Another lesson awaits graduates

By: PHIL STRICKLAND - For The Californian | Monday, June 11, 2007 7:16 PM PDT ∞

Southwest County high schools are sending the vast majority of their seniors out into the world this month.

Already, life has yet another lesson waiting for those who will be attending Cal State San Marcos and the other 22 campuses that comprise the California State University system.

And that lesson is: Someone has to pay the piper. In this case, it's more than 400,000 someones attending classes at Cal State.

That's a lot of lesson learning and it doesn't come as cheap as it once did. Just last month, the Cal State system voted to increase student fees by 10 percent.

The system has been doing a lot of that since 2001. After eight years of no fee increases, student fees have climbed 94 percent in the last six years. Including the most recent hike of $252, academic fees will be $2,772 this coming academic year.

Add to that an average $672 in campus-based fees and students will be shelling out more than $3,400 a year from their moth-ridden wallets to attend Cal State.

And that doesn't count room and board, which is by far the largest expense a Cal State student that doesn't live at home will face.

Critics of the increase point to a 23 percent hike in pay for administrators over the same period. The faculty only got a 3.5 percent nudge.

The faculty, however, fared better this last round of negotiations after it threatened a series of walkouts if the university didn't come through with a substantial pay increase.

And it got it, to the tune of more than 20 percent, and up to 31 percent in some cases, over the next four years.

By the end of the contract, the base salary for a non-tenured faculty member will be nearly $91,000. Tenured professors will get $105,000 on average.

Now, we could debate the relative merits of administrative and faculty compensation, the quality of education at Cal State compared with other public schools, its cost relative to those schools, the spending of its budget, the level of its funding from the state and so on, but in the end, it is what it is.

What is interesting to note is that during the most recent union negotiations, students joined the informational picket lines in support of their professors' efforts to get better pay.

In truth, the threat of walkouts probably had more to do with a settlement being reached than the sight of students marching about campus.

Students, after all, always can find something to protest, but a strike, that is a problem and administrators don't like problems, particularly labor problems. Besides, 3.5 percent in raises over six years is a little difficult to defend.

But the students were there nonetheless, probably feeling pretty fulfilled.

By early May, the contract had been ratified, leaving only the students out in the fiscal cold and facing that 10 percent fee increase. In mid-May, that battle, too, was over.

The students never stood a chance, what with their fees contributing about 25 percent of the system's budget, salaries ñ--- administrative and faculty -- included.

That sense of fulfillment no doubt quickly turned to an empty feeling. They can be forgiven for asking: "What happened? What about us?"

What happened? The piper got paid.

-- Phil Strickland of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: philipestrickland@yahoo.com.