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Comment by TedShiller | Hacker News Reader

This is a positive for Berkeley. Having had many friends graduate from there over the last 20 years, they all said it was massively overcrowded. People standing in lecture halls that were designed for half the students. TAs being overwhelmed, not able to give attention.

I would even go further and reduce the population over time rather than just freezing it. Let Berkeley be the place it once was.

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I went to Berkeley and I disagree. The reason for overcrowding isn't increase in school size, it is reduced support from the state and administrative mismanagement & bloat. It's literally hunger games for pretty much all the schools except Haas and EECS when it's time to get funding.

Tuition is more than 35% of all revenue. All domestic students have to pay AT MOST of 1 year of out of state tuition, because you establish in state residency in your first year here. So you have to get more students to make more money. State support is now just 14% of the revenue (used to be a lot more before). Federal grants have reduced dramatically. The only other sources left are gifts, which btw only select schools bring in.

Meanwhile the costs are only going up. 40% of the budget goes into wages and staffing costs. And another 20% goes towards pensions. I was a TA for an undergrad course and we had 80 students per TA, mostly because of budget cuts.

So yeah letting Berkeley be the place it once was requires not only increased state and federal funding, but also increase in tuition to keep up with inflated wages that people need to be paid in Berkeley, CA.

Yes! In 1980 the state of California paid about 80% of the cost of an undergraduate student's education. Today it is about 8%. The state has dis-invested from higher education to fund other things (like prisons).

The percentage of the state budget allocated for Tertiary Education in 1980 was 8.9% vs 8.1% in 2021. Prison spending was 1.8% of the budget in 1980 vs 2.1% in 2021.

Hmm, where did you get that number from? [0] says:

> Higher education spending accounted for 18% of the state budget in 1976–77, but by 2016–17 higher education funding had fallen to 12% of the budget. These funding cuts have been felt most strongly at the University of California, where funding per full-time-equivalent student fell from slightly more than $23,000 to about $8,000. CSU funding per student has also fallen by about 25% since 1976–77 from slightly more than $11,000 per student to slightly less than $9,000.

It appears that the number of students has skyrocketed (UCB in 1980: ~14k, in 2020: ~32k) while total funding has not even kept up with baseline inflation. Also driving salaries upward are housing costs near some of the biggest schools (LA and Bay Area housing costs much more now than in 1980 in "inflation-adjusted" terms).

Another big difference, though, is how much financial aid students get, which is heavily biased toward low-income first-in-family students who, presumably, are less likely to complain about the state of things than privileged middle-class young adults whose lives are harder than their parents'. (Over 50% of the 675k total UC and CSU students pay no tuition, also according to [0].)

The fact that the percentage of the state budget allocated to Higher Ed is not super dissimilar from 1980 ignores that the amount of public funding per-student has dropped dramatically while the cost of providing that education has risen dramatically.

[0]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in...

This is where I got the numbers from: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/california_state_spendi....

I agree that ballooning costs in the face of a constant slice of the same pie is a problem, but I wasn’t sure that diverting funding to prisons was the reason why, and that’s really all I wanted to check.

Maybe they should think about limiting and then reducing their administrative staff.

That would be a start, but not enough. The larger problem is that it costs money to run a university and UC system has most students on discounted tuition. So they need to find money somewhere. You can have less students at twice the tuition, but that’s not a solution.

> All domestic students have to pay AT MOST of 1 year of out of state tuition, because you establish in state residency in your first year here.

Is that sort of thing normal? Not the 1-year time frame, but is it normal that living on campus changes your residency such that you can qualify for in-state tuition? That just seems bizarre; unless you are moving to the campus (or nearby) full time (that is, not "going home" between semesters and during the summer), it feels kinda wrong for that to establish residency.

I grew up in Maryland and went to college in New York, but I never changed my residency to NY. I don't recall any of my out-of-state college friends doing so either (for example, we all kept our home-state driver's licenses).

I don't think this is correct based on these:

  - https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/can-pay-state-tuition-one-year-another-state/

  - https://www.ucop.edu/uc-legal/_files/ed-affairs/uc-residence-policy.pdf

It states that "Physical presence in California solely for educational purposes does not constitute the establishment of California residence, regardless of length of stay. "

> All domestic students have to pay AT MOST of 1 year of out of state tuition, because you establish in state residency in your first year here.

This isn't true in many cases. I was an out of state student attending a California university and was paying out of state tuition for all years. You can only establish residency if you demonstrate financial independence (e.g., you need a full time job). If you have someone else helping pay the tuition that is outside the state, or if you're using loans to fund yourself, you remain an out of stater.

> All domestic students have to pay AT MOST of 1 year of out of state tuition, because you establish in state residency in your first year here.

yeah... universities worked this issue out more than 20 years ago. maybe a couple of folks will chime in with post-2010 bachelor's degrees from some place that hasn't caught on, but this is largely gone.

Seems like they should have funded their pensions appropriately when they offered them.

> and administrative mismanagement & bloat

Ding ding ding.

Universities managed to function (by some miracle) before the current explosion in support staff. It's doubly amazing because much of the work performed by support staff in the 1960's, 70's and 80's has been automated.

Some examples:

* The registar's office used to manage paper lists of students, and "signing up" for class meant showing up in person to write your name in ink. Your "permanent record" was a physical manila envelope with paper inside. That's all done in a web portal now.

* The bursar's office handled physical checks or cash for nearly everyone. Today almost virtually all payment is handled electronically.

* Professors (or their TAs) can now use a departmental copy/print machine to automatically create stapled exam packets instead of having an administrative assistant copy, collate and staple the exam.

Somehow, the enormous technology-driven increase in labor productivity, seen in all other sectors of the economy, has not impacted colleges and universities. That "somehow" is mismanagement and bloat.

I think the bigger issue, IMHO, is that the US population has grown massively, and we are also attracting way more [wealthy] overseas students, yet the number of "prestigious" universities hasn't growth accordingly. Naturally there is huge tension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

Prestigious is opinion, of course, but Ivy / Ivy+ / Seven-Sisters / whatever your definition of desirable college might me, I dont think that list has grown as much as population. So we need to grow seats+faculties or we need to foster more colleges to attract the increased population.

EDIT: I myself went to UC Berkeley for grad school, and Cornell for undergrad. I can already see that my children, who would be applying ~2031-2033 would have a way more difficult time getting into the same institutions, given ever-increasing applications and ever lower acceptance rates. I hope there are many more universities we can select from in 2031...or I hope my startup takes off and i'm rich, which would probably solve the problem per my understanding of how these things work...

I don't think it really makes sense to "scale" the number of prestigious schools. a big part of what makes a school prestigious to most people is that it appears on a relatively short list of top schools. you can try to say the top 100 is the new top 10, but you can't actually make people remember the names of 100 different schools.

what you can do is increase the standards at less prestigious schools. I got a great education at a state school with an acceptance rate of >60%. it's not well known nationally, but it is regarded quite well by local employers. its relationships with local employers helped land me and most of my classmates with great jobs straight out of school.

What if by limiting enrollment it meant many of those friends hadn't been able to go there? Because that's what we're talking about: trading off a (possibly) better experience for a smaller student body with providing more opportunities for a larger number of people.

Having a very selective school in the Bay Area is a good thing, better than one that just keeps growing in size. You can't be super selective and huge. Hence Stanford vs Berkeley.

Berkeley is super selective and huge mate.

> super selective and huge

Why don't we give Nobel Prizes to everyone, since you said we can be super selective and huge?

It depends on your definition of huge.

Berkeley is a graduate school masquerading as an undergraduate school.

When I went, the undergraduate population was roughly 10k whereas the graduate population was roughly 20k.

The undergraduate school is factors smaller than the largest undergraduate schools.

EDIT: Largest undergraduate schools are around 60k! Even UofT Austin is around 40k.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

EDIT2: The prestige comes from 1) famous grads 2) the professors who are supported by the graduate students. The undergrads gain from the reflected prestige.

I've known people who chose Berkeley over Stanford. It's a personal choice and there is no right answer for the lucky few that gain admission to both. However, this is considered a fairly unusual decision. People are attracted to the higher selectiveness and the smaller size.

Personally, I would prefer it if people weren't like that. But it's the way it is.

Just noting how similar this attitude is to anti-immigrant rhetoric nationally, which is ironic coming from someone who has connections in liberal Berkeley.

Another note, "let Berkeley be like it once was" sounds a lot like "Make America Great Again."

Not at all. Having a larger pool of applicants, for example from a large immigrant population, can only help. If I were hiring, or selecting the best students, I would want to make my selection from the largest possible pool.

> how similar this attitude is to anti-immigrant rhetoric nationally, which is ironic coming from someone who has connections in liberal Berkeley

If you live in the area, you'll quickly realize that the typical Bay Area Nimby is no less Xenophobia than the Trump supporters they vehemently despise. "All are welcome (but just don't move here)"

I would like to have the luxury to call myself a NIMBY. One day, maybe. Unfortunately building more housing won't mean I can afford a house. But I wish it would.

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