And yet the Regents and Gov. Brown backed AB 131, giving Illegal Aliens $65 Million of Legal Students’ State aid and further impacting education budget with no ROI (return on investment). This will only become larger every year. Say goodbye to YOUR higher education. Middle Class Students are seeing their aid reduced or nullified, Tuition costs increased, and have to resort to lifetime Loan Debt. Sorry if the truth hurts. :(

http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/30/dream-act-could-cost-more-than-previously-estimated-according-to-report/

With the heavy recruitment of out-of-state and Foreign Nationals who can pay nearly twice the in-state tuition rate to refund our defunct education system (and who don’t qualify for State aid but still “pay into the system”), Legal Californian Residents and Legal Immigrants will be “priced out” and “placed out” of THEIR American Dream, THEIR higher education.

First off, I though your front page “news” article from last Thursday was “UC officials plan for more public input”? Isn’t it strange that—after you write of how the administrative 1-percenters “plan for more public input,” you publish a call for them to heed public input? I’d think the chronology would work the other way.
I’m not disagreeing that the UC system needs to heed the input of its students considerably more; I’m merely pointing out the abysmal, inaccurate, and inconsistent coverage that The Bruin gives its students, which significantly hampers their ability to have or contribute their input—how can they realize that they should be democratically involved in this process, or what their developed beliefs would be that they would contribute democratically, or when and where to democratically contribute these beliefs with such terrible coverage The Bruin has given to the systemic issues of the UC system and the events surrounding it? There was no mention in The Bruin before the regents came last Monday that they would be coming to UCLA; there was no printed coverage of what happened when they came afterwards, except for a few sentences in the pitiful and deceitful “UC officials plan for more public input,” despite the fact that over 200 students rallied outside during the day in vocal and stirring protests, 50 went inside and shut the meeting down, around 15 risking (and thwarting) arrest by over 80 riot cops, inside an unprecedentedly large and guarded police-state-esque barricade? The Daily Bruin is failing in its duty as a distributor and informer of news both future and past that would be relevant to its students.
But you are the opinion editors, I know—but you are failing too. You say “It is unacceptable that the board is only now announcing outreach efforts. It should not have taken controversial police actions or strong protest movements for this to commence.” This applies to your board just as much as it does to the regents—you have been thoroughly (and largely unfoundedly) negative, dismissive, and discouraging of said student input and movements up to now, and even thoroughly reluctant to cover said movements. You have published at least 5 distinct full-length anti-Occupy opinion articles, and one so far in almost moderate halfway favor (in which you only say police brutality against protesters is bad—which amounts to an opinion as controversial and as worthy of being written on as “puppies are cute,” or “pain is bad”). Only now are you starting, in a very reluctant, lukewarm, half-assed, unproductive, unapologetic, milquetoast manner to support our cause of democratizing the UC system.
You state and attempt to forward (in one entire sentence! Wowee!) the extremely progressive notion that we should have an undergraduate representative AND a graduate representative on the board of regents—this against 16 administrative, one-percenter representatives appointed for terms 12 times as long as student regents on the board.
You also claim—equally as courageously and timely—that the root of the anti-democratic nature of the UC system is a lack of student input. This is so pathetically defeatist it actually hurts us—the regents may grudgingly increase the length of public comment, but that will only increase the amount of what we say that they pay no heed to, that they utterly ignore regardless, without changing either the procedure or the substance of this anti-democratic system. Public comment is merely a PR stunt for the regents to pretend to be representative of us—none of them are elected; there is 1 student regent (appointed by non-students for a 1 year term) and 16 regents (appointed by the governor—overwhelmingly to bankers/financiers, none of whom have any backing in higher education—for 12 year terms without the possibility of impeachment). They are not required to consider public comment in any way in their votes or discussions—as you would know from experience if you actually went to or covered their meeting at UCLA last Monday—they only use it as a fake bribe to placate growing student unrest. What to really demand—not ask for, but take—is participatory democracy as a mode of determining UC system-wide operations and rules, or—if not that (for now)—then a completely representative democracy, with actual (and yearly) elections by the students, faculty, and workers of the UC system, NOT the administrators who have autocratically hijacked and destroyed it form within these past ten years.
What you could begin by doing—if you actually seek to create and foster democracy within the UC system at a time of crisis—is actually covering and opining on Occupy UCLA’s democratic people’s shutdown of the regents meeting this past Monday. It was the only democratic response to a fundamentally anti-democratic system: a people’s shutdown of said system. These protesters replaced the regents meeting with a people’s assembly to democratically determine—by the students, for the students—some future UC policy and operations. The police barred the true public from entering for a while, but The Daily Bruin barred the other 29,900 students on our campus from attending by utterly failing in every way to cover both the news and the morals behind that regents meeting.
The regents reconvened elsewhere in secret, after the protesters had evicted them from their own meeting on our campus, to vote behind closed doors (in a blatantly illegal violation of the Bagley-Keenes Act, rendering the vote moot) while real democracy was occurring for the first time on UCLA’s campus. International news powers from The Wall Street Journal to CNN were there, and covered us in depth, and fairly—where was The Daily Bruin? You are supposed to report on UCLA campus/student news, and yet you were conspicuously absent while other organizations who have the news of the whole world and all its people to consider focused in on us.
You say this is our university, but where were you when we chanted that? You say this is our university, but you have done nothing to help keep and/or make it that way. You say this is our university, but you publicly attack and deride those who attempt to keep this public time and time again while you do nothing for us.
Take some accountability for your actions (or lack thereof). Take some actual, real, effective action. Stop talking, start doing (even if it is only through REAL coverage, as a REAL student paper, by and for REAL students). Make some opinions more controversial than (essentially) “plutocratic oligarchies are bad because they don’t publicly ignore us long enough [but, as a subtext, shame on those protesters actually trying to substantively change this system!)” You’re the opinion board, after all; have some real opinions, not just lukewarm, largest-common-denominator-pandering, lukewarm cowardly tip-toeing-around-the-issue compromises.
You’re a student newspaper; start acting like one. It’s taken you much more than long enough.

Don Honda,

Surprised to see you here again, spreading false information. Fact is that undocumented students are not and will not be taking away any allocation from Cal Grants or any other state funded form of financial aid. AB 131 explicitly states that undocumented students are not eligible for Cal Grants until ALL eligible residents have been awarded funds. Copy of that section of the text can be found below. Therefore, no one (legal or undocumented)a is getting placed out as a result of undocumented students having an opportunity (and an unequal one at that) for state funds. Let’s stop scapegoating and start working towards progress in reforming immigration policy instead.

“A student who is exempt from paying nonresident tuition under Section 68130.5 shall not be eligible for Competitive Cal Grant A and B Awards unless funding remains available after all California students not exempt pursuant to Section 68130.5 have received Competitive Cal Grant A and B Awards that they are eligible for.”

Carlos Juarez,

As tired I am of Don Honda’s spam, I need to correct you on the facts with respect to Cal Grants. What you’re saying is true of Competitive Cal Grants, as the part of the bill you quoted shows. However, AB 131 makes undocumented students (specifically those satisfying AB 540 requirements) fully eligible for the entitlement Cal Grant A and Cal Grant B (http://www.calgrants.org/index.cfm?navid=11). The state funds those, and there is no requirement to put non AB 540 students before AB 540 students. Considering CA’s limited financial resources, those funds that AB 540 students will be getting in the form of entitlement Cal Grants A/B will have to come from somewhere else. Let’s see, whose funding can CA cut next? More cuts in K-12 education? More cuts to Cal State and UCs? Close more state parks?

Furthermore, AB 131 also makes AB 540 students eligible for institutional grants, and again AB 131 places no restriction on the institution to prioritize non AB 540 students. Considering the financial resources of our higher education institutions, it is unlikely they will increase funding for these grants in light of the increased number of eligible students. So, chances are there will be AB 540 students who take the place of legal students in receiving these institutional grants. Some of those affected legal students may end up getting priced out of higher education. The possibility is there.

Given the above facts, your statement:
“Therefore, no one (legal or undocumented)a is getting placed out as a result of undocumented students having an opportunity (and an unequal one at that) for state funds.”
is simply not true.

To add what PK said about the competitive Cal Grants:

The bill states that only after all competitive cal grants have been given out AB540 students become eligible to receive the remainder. My question is, why? If the grants are competitive, then surely there is a way to simply increase the amount of them given to legal students. Why should legal resident/citizen students miss out on financial aid so that illegal immigrant students can benefit? Especially when their parents pay taxes into the system.

This also opens up the doorways to corruption: what is stopping the passing of an amendment that changes the qualification criteria for the competitive cal grants so that less are given out to legal resident/citizen students and more are given out to illegal immigrant studetns?

An example of haw University of California campus chancellors pick the pockets of students and their parents, University of California Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau hijack’s all our kids’ futures.
I love University of California (UC) having been a student & lecturer. Like so many I am deeply disappointed by the pervasive failures of Birgeneau from holding the line on rising costs & tuition increases. On an all in cost, Birgeneau has molded Cal. into the most expensive public university.
Paying more is not a better education. Instate tuition consumes 14% of Calif. median family income! Faculty wages must reflect California’s ability to pay, not what others are paid.
Chancellor Birgeneau ($450,000 salary) dismissed many much needed cost-cutting options. He did not consider freezing vacant faculty positions, increasing class size, requiring faculty to teach more classes, doubling the time between sabbaticals, freezing pay & benefits, reforming pensions & health benefits.
Birgeneau said such faculty reforms “would not be healthy for Cal”. Exodus of faculty, administrators: who can afford them?
We agree it is far from the ideal situation. UC Berkeley cannot expect to do business as usual: raising tuition; granting pay raises & huge bonuses during a weak economy that has sapped state revenues & individual Californians’ income.
Birgeneau can bridge the trust gap with alumni, donors, politicians, and the public with reassurances that salaries & costs reflect California’s ability to pay.

We must act. Chancellor Birgeneau’s campus police deployed violent baton jabs on students protesting increases in tuition. The sky above UC will not fall when Chancellor Birgeneau ($450,000 salary) is ousted.

Opinions? Email the UC Board of Regents marsha.kelman@ucop.edu

Thank you PK, for the corrections on AB131. Just one correction to your response, focusing on the institutional aid component of AB131 and how that is funded: 33% of institutional aid funds at the UC actually comes from student fees of all enrolled students including undocumented students, a pool of funds that UC students are able to apply for… except undocumented students, at least prior to AB131. That means that for some time now, students who needed the most financial support (students ineligible for any state aid, often from low income backgrounds) were barred from accessing funds that they themselves were paying into. So rather than thinking about it as having one student over another taking funds from institutional aid, AB130 levels out the playing field so that all qualifying students in financial need can have an equal opportunity for financial support. In addition, AB540 students, especially at the turn of massive tuition fee increases in recent years, have probably been overwhelmingly placed out of education in much higher numbers to be taking the place of anyone else in higher education due to affordability.
In terms of Cal Grants, I still cannot agree with you in your argument that AB540 students will be taking place of legal residents within the UC with the understood implication that there’s a difference on who deserves an education above others depending on legal status. In addition, AB540 students would not be eligible for these funds until Jan 2013 so we don’t know how funding nor allocation of these Cal Grants are going to look like as the state is still developing a way to do so (meanwhile ways to cut it). In the end, legal status should not be a factor in determining financial need and assistance from the state for qualified AB540 students. As so, I also cannot agree on the understood implication that these students will add pressure on the state to cut other programs in order to sustain needs of AB540 students applying for state aid since there’s no such trend to back that. These things can remain a fundamental disagreement. Either way, I would dismiss the idea of any UC student as taking the place of other qualifying UC students in education, but rather figure out ways to keep stakeholders accountable for making an education a right for all who want to purse an education.

Carlos J.,

To reply to your counter argument re: Cal Gransts,

“I still cannot agree with you in your argument that AB540 students will be taking place of legal residents within the UC with the understood implication that there’s a difference on who deserves an education above others depending on legal status.”

If you want to argue explicitly about AB 540 students taking the place of non AB 540 students, then no, I don’t think I can argue with you. I can’t conclusively argue that’s what will happen. My goal was to point out that the possibility is there, and since (to me) your earlier point implied that legal students will not be negatively affected by AB 131, I wanted to raise the broader point that AB131 can and will negatively impact legal students, among others. The fact that it won’t take affect until 2013 doesn’t change anything. CA’s financial problems isn’t going away anytime soon. We do not have unlimited resources (in fact, far from it). Assuming no chance from today’s enrollment numbers, CSAC estimates $13mil for entitlement Cal Grants for AB 540 students. Additional cost to one thing will mean additional pressure to reduce cost of other things, or pressure to increase revenue (a cost to taxpayers). That money will have to come from something/someone else whether you want to believe it or not.

On the second part of the above sentence, I say this: I don’t believe there is a difference between who has a right to education based on legal status. I believe there is a difference between who has a right to state funding based on legal status. You don’t see us financing out of state and international students with Cal Grants or giving them in-state tuition, do you? Our fundamental difference is that unlike you, I don’t believe AB 540 students should be granted the benefits of legal residency without actually having the legal status. I’m all for immigration reform, but until then, I don’t agree in making exceptions to the rules. On that note, I thank you for presenting your views (I like to be well informed of the facts and the arguments), but I’m going to simply and respectfully disagree with you.