Governor's Budget Plan Threatens Opportunities

This summer, a great debate is before us in Sacramento, a debate with serious implications for you as college students: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed more than $650 million in cuts to California's public colleges and universities, fee hikes of greater than 30 percent for undergraduate students and 50 percent for graduate students over the next three years, a 44 percent hike in fees for community college students, cuts to the Cal Grant program and an $11.6 million reduction in UC research funding.

The Schwarzenegger administration has also proposed to ask the UCs and CSUs to find "non-state resources" to fund most of its outreach efforts, which help disadvantaged students compete for college, after slashing them by 50 percent earlier this year.

While there are many questions to be answered about how to solve the state's truly dire fiscal problems, I believe the problems before us are larger than where to make cuts or raise revenues. The real problem is whether the leaders of this state will keep the commitment that our parents and grandparents made to invest in the next generation or whether our elected leaders will shirk that commitment, to the detriment of your education and, I believe, to the future of our state.

As state treasurer, my first priority is to protect our economy today and to build our economy for tomorrow. I believe the governor's budget proposals for our public colleges and universities take our state in the wrong direction – undermining our state's historic commitment to a first-class higher educational system that provides opportunity to all Californians and that will be our ticket to economic progress in the decades ahead. What is truly troubling is that the governor has proposed slashing state support for higher education and hiking fees on students while refusing to consider closing one corporate tax loophole or restoring the state's income tax rates on the wealthiest Californians to where they were under Republican governors Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.

This January, I had the chance to tour some of our state's great UC, CSU, and community college campuses. While I have always believed that education is an important investment in our state's economic strength, I came away from this tour more convinced than ever of the importance of these great institutions, not only for the benefit they provide our economy, but also for the opportunity and promise they offer the next generation of Californians. In my opinion, we should be debating how we can invest more, not less, in our students, these institutions and in the future of our state.

On my college tour, I met many students who told me that their dreams of attending our state's four-year universities simply would not be possible without the assistance, support, and guidance they received from the very CSU and UC outreach programs the governor proposed in January to eliminate. At San Diego City College, I met with four students in the MESA program – the Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement outreach program. None of their parents had gone to college, and all of the students in this program were working at jobs just to make ends meet. Because of the MESA program, these students are poised to go on to our great university system, to study biology, engineering and biomedical science, and to make their contribution to California's future.

We must ensure that our world-renowned public college and university system can continue to provide the opportunity for the aforementioned students and the thousands of other students to fulfill their dreams of attending college, where they can acquire the knowledge and skills they will need to excel in and contribute to a burgeoning 21st Century economy.

I plan to continue fighting to protect California's higher education system and to maintain its legacy as an educational system that is worthy of your future. I urge you to make your voices heard too, so that, together, we can steer this debate in the right direction. E-mail or call the governor and your legislators, and let them know that this fight is about more than dollars and cents – it is about your education and about the future of this great state.