On Wednesday, a group of students at UC Riverside presented a proposal to UC President Mark Yudof that would abolish tuition – and he’s actually considering it.
"We will give it a close look," Yudoff said after praising the students’ "constructive idea," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
"I have directed Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom and our best number crunchers to review it thoroughly," Yudoff went on to say.
The University of California system is the state’s public university system with a combined student body of about 235,000 students. In recent years it’s seen it’s state and federal funding diminish and it’s instituted regular tuition increases. They’ve also eliminated course sections, initiated staff lay offs and skip maintenance projects. (UC Police have also been busy pepper spraying students.)
The plan the students have devised could actually result with UC system getting billions of more dollars in the end. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the UC Student Investment Proposal":
Instead of paying tuition – currently at $12,192, not including mandatory fees, room, board or books – the "UC Student Investment Proposal" would require that students commit to paying 5 percent of their annual income for 20 years after graduating.
"Under this plan, no undergraduate student would have to worry about paying for their UC education while they are in school," Chris LoCascio, president of Fix UC – the group of UC Riverside students that developed the idea – said in a presentation to the regents.
The students calculate that, under the most conservative estimates, UC could triple its revenue over the next two decades to $4.6 billion. The plan would be phased in over several years, and students say UC would begin receiving more income from graduates than from tuition by year seven.
The Chronicle crunched the numbers and found that a UC graduate making an annual salary of $50,000 for 20 years would end up paying $50,000 for tuition in the end–slightly more than the $48,768 they would currently pay over four years if UC tuition were frozen at its current level.