How much money do the employees at UC, CSU and community colleges receive? See TRANSPARENT CALIFORNIA. What is the amount of current and projected pension or other retirement liability for these public college employees when they retire? To what extent is education availableelection? Should corporations in America ever be limited to hiring persons already in America or should they be allowed to hire anyone they can find - at any price - around the globe? Should corporations be allowed to add jobs where there is no new housing? Should corporations be allowed to vote in elections or just control election outcomes by recruiting candidates and financing campaigns? How about neither?

The big question is the one that is least analyzed in this article: why DID tuition rise as a multiple of inflation at the universities? I suspect that the root causes are pension and healthcare costs for employees. Until this incredible expansion in cost is addressed, finding more money to pay for education is just throwing good money after bad.

I question the author’s statement that the reduction in funding to higher education over time is due to budget cuts during recessions. In general, the recessions show up as blips in the overall state budget which quickly recover and surpass prior spending. The problem is that the money has progressively been reallocated to different priorities and wrongly so to my mind. I reviewed enacted budget data from the first and last years available here:

Web Link

I tabulated all items in the 2019-2020 budget over $10B (values below are in thousands), sorted largest to smallest, and compared them to 2007 - 2008. Root cause for the problem appears to be extreme bloat in Health and Human Services which has overtaken K-12 Ed to become the largest component of the budget. It’s growth rate has been more than double k-12 and more than triple higher ed. My guess is that our priorities are being very badly skewed from proactive planning for the future to “firefighting” HHS issues.

State Agencies 2019-20 2007 - 2008 % Growth
Health and Human Services $67,139,332 38,006,679 77%
K thru 12 Education $60,137,016 45,423,994 32%
Higher Education $18,479,257 14,978,543 23%
Corrections and Rehabilitation $15,788,581 9,858,402 60%
Transportation $15,729,491 13,285,377 18%
General Government $10,908,785 8,539,392 28%