Despite protests by students and faculty, the Cal State University Board of Trustees voted unanimously on Wednesday to raise tuition at the school by six percent.
Board members said that even though they were reluctant to approve the price hike, they believed they had no choice. Cal State joins other universities that have raised tuition prices in recent years, including USC.
USC tuition has increased by five percent in each of the last two years. USC President Carol Folt said that the university lost “nearly $1.2 billion in extra costs and lost revenues” between 2020 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic inflation.
In an impassioned statement, Cal State University Trustee Leslie Gilbert Lurie exclaims she feels the university simply has “not found an alternative path.”
The price hikes will begin in 2024-2025 and will be implemented over the next five years.
CSU executive vice chancellor & chief financial officer Steve Relyea said, “The revenue from the tuition increase is essential to provide the CSU with the financial stability it needs to continue to serve students today and in the future”.
An amendment to the proposal introduced by Chair Wenda Fong would have reduced the time period of tuition increase to three years at the same rate. But the motion failed, with the majority of committee members speaking out against the amendment.
According to reports, students and faculty were baffled by the increase, as the school hadn’t raised costs in 12 years save for a 5 percent increase in 2017.
Lurie said that CSU campuses across the state are in “shocking disrepair”: Staff salaries are being repeatedly undercut and student services have been increasingly underfunded. She also said the university owes a better standard of education to current and future students, which will only be possible with more funding. The only other option would be to cut services, which would affect all students.
Several members, including Trustee Jean Picker Firstenberg, echoed Lurie’s sentiments, declaring that the CSU community “cannot survive if we don’t take action.”
Before the vote, the board stressed that they were aware of the financial hardships many of their students will experience in the face of this additional burden.
Lieutenant Governor of California Eleni Kounalakis pointed out the majority of their student body are economically disadvantaged students who could not and cannot afford to attend private universities. Building off Kounalakis’ concerns, Trustee Raji Kaur Brar pled with committee members to keep in mind the total cost of attendance these students are responsible for, which is not just tuition, but also housing and transportation costs.
Nearing the vote, in a very emotional speech, Trustee Jose Antonio Vargas highlighted the importance of keeping universities such as CSU financially accessible so that high school graduates, like his “nieces and nephews, can go to Cal State,” as he did.
A worry consistently brought up throughout the meeting was that the university would suffer less funding paired with lower enrollment rates if a large number of students begin to drop out after tuition is raised. Lurie posed a solution, stating the committee must work hard to receive state funding, so as to not rely solely on students to fund the university. She wants members of the committee to be committed to this cause, so that “no student…will be priced out of the system” after the new tuition policy is implemented.
Before the vote took place, Chair Wenda Fong clarified that the tuition increase will not fix all the budgetary and funding issues the university has been enduring.
Photo courtesy of Jaradpetroske / CC BY 4.0