Dramatic cuts to USC’s tuition assistance benefits that affect staff, faculty and their families will take effect this summer.
The current Tuition Assistance Benefit (TAB) program provides 100% tuition assistance for active full-time faculty and staff, with unlimited graduate certificates.
Children of USC employees also benefit: each dependent child of faculty or staff currently has full tuition coverage for an undergraduate degree, and 50% assistance for a graduate degree.
Some of these benefits, however, are going away.
Faculty and staff will still receive 100% tuition assistance but graduate certificates won’t be covered. Their children will still be fully covered for undergraduate degrees, but will no longer have any tuition assistance for graduate degrees -- and the age cap for dependents to get tuition benefits will drop from 35 to 26.
As for spouses and partners, their tuition assistance will drop from 50% to only 25% percent.
The university made clear that its promise to pay tuition for the children of employees who have worked at the school for more than 15 years, even those who have left their jobs, will remain intact.
Professor Howard Rodman at the School of Cinematic Arts said faculty members feel they are seen as a fixed cost.
“And what do you do with a fixed cost? You exert downward pressure on it,” Rodman said. “So that was my sense of the meeting. That once again, they’re trying to balance the budget at our expense.”
Rodman shared how he felt about the decision.
“They listened just enough to be able to say ‘we heard you,’ but not enough to make the decisive difference.”
A university FAQ suggested a trade-off for higher salaries and “increasing the competitiveness of our compensation programs” but did not provide a specific reason for budget cuts.
USC has faced costly lawsuits in the last few years. The university paid $1.1 billion dollars in settlements involving roughly 18,000 women who said they were sexually assaulted by a male former gynecologist at the student health center. In 2022, USC settled lawsuits with 80 former students who accused a different campus doctor of sexual misconduct over the course of two decades.
The recent benefits announcement has ignited a flame of frustration among faculty members. Some staff have expressed their anger in public LinkedIn posts; others have said that they are organizing to protest the cuts, and some have suggested legal action.