Opinion

How UC Berkeley went from free speech to costly tuition

I’m going back to the UC Berkeley campus this week for the 50th reunion of the Free Speech Movement. You may have heard in some history class about Mario Savio and the first student sit-in of the ’60s. That was us FSMers.

It will be a little surreal. A university that had nearly 800 of us arrested in December 1964 is welcoming us back by hanging Free Speech banners on the building we occupied. We’re coming home like a victorious football team. But it’s not a real victory, because the same forces that tried to shut us up in the 1960s have a more chilling form of control over U.S. college students today than they ever had over us. Today, it’s not police control; it’s economic control.

Attending Berkeley cost me $62.50 a semester. That covered registration, lab fees, health care and a student body card. My tuition was free. (It was $600 for out-of-state students.) Today, in-state tuition and fees total $12,972 per year.

There’s been inflation, of course, but nothing that begins to explain this huge jump. The increase also can’t be explained by the cost of new stadiums and lavish buildings, which we intellectual alumni love to deplore. Nor is it due to teachers’ salaries. Low-paid adjuncts do much more of the teaching today. Top academic administrative salaries, like top corporate executive salaries, have increased beyond inflation, it’s true, but not by enough to account for a tuition increase from nothing to nearly $13,000.

My tuition could be “free” in the 1960s because higher education was supported by state and federal funds. But since my school days, the rich have rebelled against paying taxes. With so much government support gone, the bulk of tuition must now be paid by students themselves. But salaries have stagnated at best, so a lot of that increased tuition is financed by borrowing.

I realized how much this prospect must dampen the campus atmosphere when I opened the UC Berkeley website and clicked “cost of attendance.” Before I got to the dollar amounts, I was assured in big letters, “A Berkeley education earns our graduates an additional $26,333 each year in income over those who did not go to college.”

Since Berkeley is still an excellent school, its students will surely learn to recognize the slippery wording and limited predictive value of that undocumented statistic on future earnings. They will therefore worry about the debt they’re piling up. And they’re right to worry.

Thanks to intense bank lobbying , student loans are uniquely punitive. Most can’t be refinanced, which means that people who borrowed at 8 percent in the 1990s are still paying 8 percent. Unlike other loans, student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and a borrower’s salary, Social Security and even disability checks can be garnisheed.

We went to college to discover how to do something “worthwhile” with our lives. Today’s graduates, even from good schools such as Berkeley, don’t have that security.

I’m looking forward to seeing old friends at the reunion. I suspect we’ll spend a lot of time wondering if there was something we should have done then, or could have been doing more of since then, to make things come out differently. Maybe the indebted generation will figure it out and take our old adversaries by surprise, as we once did.

MCT Information Services