by Contessa Abono
SF State students start buying their text books at the campus library (photo by Stephen Morrison)
On top of over crowded classrooms, sky-high textbook prices and fewer classes being offered, college students deal with tuition increases and in the past years they have been hit hard-but they are preparing to fight back.
The Students and Families for Tuition Relief Now, as they call themselves, are organizing the first-student led ballot initiative to freeze tuition at UC and CSU.
Tuition has almost doubled in the past six years in UC and CSU and many students and parents cannot afford it. “I have to use student loans and work 40 hours a week to pay for school,” says Erik Hernández a History major and senior at SF State.
The proposed law that the Students and Families for Tuition Relief Now is trying to get passed is the college affordability Act of 2008, which would freeze tuition for five years for resident’s undergraduates in both UC and CSU. After those five years any future tuition increases would not be allowed to exceed the inflation index.
The law would raise new revenue specifically for the cost of education UC and CSU students through a 1 percent tax on millionaires income over $1 million. The law would also establish an accountability process requiring UC and CSU administrators to report to a citizen’s panel of students and parents on how the new revenues are being spent.
Carlos Córdoba a Professor for the Raza program at San Francisco State University says that most students that are in the CSU are working class, “a good majority of the Latino community at the university have to work,” said Córdoba.
Robert Corrigan
“ Many of them are first generation and are the first to go to college out of their families.”
Córdoba says this isn’t something new they are dealing with, “we don’t even have supplies and materials, this school is a bare minimum operation,” says Córdoba. “The more budgets cuts the more the classroom becomes less individual because they have to have more students in them.”
As far as the facility supporting the Students and Families for Tuition Relief Now Córdoba says students should take the leadership on this issue, “we support them and we believe the student are the ones that need to take the initiative.”
Robert Corrigan the President of San Francisco state says that so far the California State University and the University of California are exempted from the 10 percent mid-year budget cut the Governor has imposed on other state agencies and the community college system for 2007-08.
But this could soon change and Corrigan also adds that “if you are close to graduation, I strongly advise you to take as full a class schedule as you can manage this spring and summer. We cannot predict what next year’s budget will be and whether it will force us to cut back on sections.”
The Students and Families for Tuition Relief Now have launched an interactive website at www.tuitionreliefnow.org. Their goal is to collect 434,000 valid signatures in an attempt to qualify for the Nov. 2008 ballot.
