Update, 5 p.m. Thursday, July 22:
The University of California Board of Regents voted to begin increasing tuition in 2022-23. The Board of Regents voted to largely keep the proposal as laid out below, but with some modifications, including that the hike is no longer indefinite and will be voted on again in five years, and that a greater share of revenue from the increase will go to financial aid for in-state students.
Original story:
Get ready for whiplash: After receiving $1.3 billion in new money from lawmakers this year, the University of California now wants to raise tuition on each incoming undergraduate class. Every year. Indefinitely.
Once tuition spikes for an incoming class, it would stay flat for six years for that class — allowing students to more reliably calculate the multiyear cost of a degree.
The UC Board of Regents will vote Thursday on a tuition-hike plan two years in the works that was initially derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been resuscitated.
UC officials project that in-state tuition and systemwide fees would grow by $534 in 2022-23 and increase by a slightly lower amount for each subsequent incoming class of undergraduate students.
The upshot is that in 2026-27, California undergraduates entering the UC would owe a projected $15,078 in annual tuition and statewide fees — about $2,500 more than what in-state undergraduates pay now.
The proposal is a complicated one, stippled with tuition hike estimates pegged to inflation and studded with various exemptions meant to cap what students would ultimately owe. But what’s definite is that this marks a dramatic departure for the UC: After doubling tuition during the great recession in response to deep state cuts, the UC raised tuition just once since 2011.
“I do believe (the tuition increase is) likely to pass even though I would not like it to,” said Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza, a UC Berkeley undergraduate and a student voting member of the Board of Regents who’ll be casting her first vote at this week’s meeting.
Her dissent has powerful allies. Speaker of the Assembly Anthony Rendon, a Long Beach Democrat, and Senate President Pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins, the two leaders of the Legislature, oppose the tuition increases at this time, they told CalMatters in emails.