At UC-Berkeley, students barricaded themselves on the second floor of a building on campus in a show of defiance.

At UC-Davis, angry students refused to vacate the school's administration building. At UC-Los Angeles, dozens of protesters staged a takeover of Campbell Hall, the campus linguistics department. The same scenes appeared at many of the University of California's campuses because of the UC's Board of Regents decision to raise undergraduate tuition by 32 percent on Nov. 19. Students, outraged at the increased cost of around $2,500 per student per year, readily exercised their right to protest.

The Board raised tuition costs not only because the economy is facing a recession, but because California is continually running a deficit. The raise in tuition is necessary to close a budget gap of $535 million that resulted from a lack of state funding and a surfeit of inflation. Despite the need for funding, the University should stick to its original promise - the promise of a well-prepared populace.

Once upon a time, California planned to support everyone in their pursuit of higher education. The main principles of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education state that some form of higher education exists for all, regardless of economic needs. Academic progress should only be limited by individual proficiency and differentiation of function between community colleges, California State Universities and University of California campuses. The goal of the plan was to increase the overall efficiency of the higher education system in an attempt to produce greater numbers of graduates at a lower per-student cost by removing redundancies throughout the state system's curriculum.

However, as costs have risen and will continue to rise in the future, the plan has been pushed aside. Even with lower-cost alternatives such as going to a community college and later transferring to a CSU or UC, the average student will still rack up thousands of dollars in debt. This present tuition increase will place an even larger burden on students' laudatory striving towards reaching a career goal and becoming productive citizens.

To add insult to injury, the increase in tuition will not increase the quality of education. The UC system has already laid off nearly 2,000 employees in the last year and will continue to cut more while additionally offering fewer courses and limiting enrollment. This not only caused a spike in tuition costs, but also nearly a 25 percent increase in class sizes, thus lessening the quality of education as students will have less access to and less benefit from one-on-one time with professors.

However, even more disturbing is that although there are system-wide furloughs among employees, high level administrators do not pass up the opportunity to award themselves with pay raises. Over the last five years there has been a substantial increase in administrators' earnings.  In 2009 alone, the UC Regents have approved approximately $9 million in executive compensation increases, according to an article on Senator Leland Yee's Web site (http://dist08.casen.govoffice.com). The article further states that, at the Regents meeting in July, "several executives were appointed at salaries from 11 percent to 59 percent higher than predecessors" and that "the Regents voted to give ‘administrative stipends' ranging from $24,000 to $58,625 to several employees." Administrators have no problem giving themselves rewards, at the expense of student achievement of educational goals amidst the fallen economy.

In a question-and-answer article in The New York Times, president of the UC system Mark Yudof was asked by Deborah Solomon, "What do you think of the idea that no administrator at a state university needs to earn more than the president of the United States: $400,000?" In response, Yudof flippantly asked, "Will you throw in Air Force One and the White House?" However, Yudof needs to focus more on the needs of the students than the perks he has provided himself, because the system he is responsible for fallen under fire during his reign.
On keepcaliforniaspromise.org, a Web site dedicated to preserving the vision of the 1960 plan, Bob Meister, President of the UC Council of UC Faculty Associations and Professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz, wrote two articles in support of the 1960 plan. According to Meister, in the article "Where Does UC Tuition Go?" the university system uses educational fees arbitrarily without having transparent accountability for the spending. Therefore, tuition money many not directly fund education in these tight times, but, for example, might pay instead the interest on construction bonds or be used as bond collateral, according to Meister as stated in his article, "They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street." Although constructing new buildings for the campuses would be considered beneficial in a booming economy, the constant layoffs of personnel shows that this may not be the time to focus on new buildings when there are no teachers to teach in them. UC tuition should not be raised if it does not directly impact the quality of higher education.

On Dec. 7, lawmakers began hearings about the Master Plan. Both elected officials and chancellors recognized that the plan is an excellent one, but that it is currently underfunded. According to the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 8, CSU chancellor Charles Reed said "The Master Plan is not broken. It's the envy of others around the world. The key problem today is a lack of investment." However, California's plan cannot be envied if the money they do receive does not go directly back into the system to benefit education. Evidently, high-level administrators are not properly allocating the funds.

Overall, the UC system should commit to pushing tuition funds towards education. Students should not have to base college choices on the school's affordability or worry about whether tuition is actually being used towards their education. Hopefully, the UC system will refocus their efforts on supporting the plan  of the 1960s, which should not be relegated to a mere fairy tale. In the end, we need higher education for all, no matter the economic circumstances.