This morning we read an opinion article “if Californians have to support the Governor’s or the UC President’s idea on the future higher education in the state”.  Yes, we agree that finally UC gets budget attention for the good of the students.  Without data, anybody can make his own theories and suggestions. AAEA has compiled and completed research  many weeks ago and we are sure this research finding will be shared at the right time. It is then the perfect time to share it to the American public.
The chart below shows pretty clear that public spending on education has been pretty stable until 2011. After that year, the spending has increased quite significantly and it is projected that it will keep going up a couple years before it levels off.  As the pool of (tax) money will always finite, increasing spending on public education in the state has largely supported by taking away from other posts.  In this example, we just showed it may have come from health care and welfare. During the same period of time, these last two posts have significantly decreased while spending in public education has moved toward the other direction.

The head of the state has to look at all directions and not just one when he needs to allocate the pool of money. On the other hand, the other party may have concerned only in just one direction, namely to make UC the best school system in the world with all cost.  Similar to raced horses that have been blind-sided so that they only run toward one direction. It surely a bad deal for the Californians if the proposed tuition increase is spent to increase salary & benefit, instead of “the quality” cited as the reason to increase the tuition.  Because “the quality” is unmeasurable and even absurd, but it has been used in the past as popular escape goats.  Perhaps, the solution for the state is to take more public debts such as issuing new IOUs or raise taxes to the Californians. However, when that happens it is more likely it will not be signed by the other one who has asked for budget increase and who just secured a faculty tenure position as announced on December 20, 2014.