Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 2 on Education Finance

All right. Good morning. Welcome to our first hearing of the year. This is the budget Subcommitee on Education Finance. This is a Subcommitee, of course, and so informational hearing. So no need for a quorum this morning. We'll proceed, proceed with our hearing. We have three of our Members here today, actually two of our Members and our budget chair, who's our auxiliary Member. Always welcome, Mr. Ting.

So today is our overview hearing on the higher education portion of the budget, the state budget, focusing on the three segments, the UC, CSU, and our community colleges. The other piece of hired, of course is financial aid and the Cal grant and middle class scholarship program. We'll get to those at a later date, but today is to focus on the three segments.

Higher education is always a priority of California and the Legislature, and our goal has always been pretty simple since we've been chairing this Subcommitee, along with Mr. Ting and I for the last eight years, is access and affordability for the three segments. And we're coming off an amazing 10 year run of funding for higher education and more importantly, an amazing two year, two budgets in a row where we've made significant, significant investments, record breaking investments for higher education.

Some of the highlights include a major reform to our financial aid programs, the Cal Grant program and middle class scholarship, expanding access for 100,000 new community college awards on automatic eligibility for Cal Grant, as well as moving our middle class scholarships to pay to help cover the total cost of attendance on our road to a debt free college in California for CSU, UC and our community college students.

As far as enrollment, we've been able to significantly expand access for enrollment at UC and CSU, providing more than $200 million in ongoing funds to increase access, specifically at UC. We're very proud of the fact that we've been able to increase enrollment for California residents. Our top, top priority are California students and taxpayers who are phenomenal scholars who don't always have a slot at the University of California.

So implementing the reforms to decrease some of the non resident enrollment at the three marquee UCs in accord with the UC a few years ago. So that's a positive aspect. Last couple years, we know have been challenging with COVID with student support and mental health services rising as some of the top issues for our students, along with new issues for students in higher ed that we didn't know or talk about a decade plus ago, things like food and housing insecurity.

We're implementing programs to focus on student basic needs as well as, for the first time in the history of California, focusing on student housing that hasn't always been a focus, but realized that it's such a detriment for students to focus on their academics. We create the last couple of years a program for the state to really invest in student housing and there's a budget issue. We'll certainly get to that in a bit.

Today, of course, is our chance to talk about the beginnings of the 23,24 budget. Our priorities remain the same, access and affordability as well as quality for the systems. We don't have as much ongoing new proposals in this year's budget with certainly talk of a deficit. We won't know those revenue numbers, frankly, until after the May revise. We'll hear from a little bit.

We do have a few proposals from the Governor as far as increased funding for the UC and CSU at 5%, as well as a significant Prop 98 COLA which will help the community colleges where their needs. And focusing on the COLA, that's not a certainty yet. We have to figure out what the final revenues coming in and what our Prop 98 call would be. Lastly, there are a few proposals from the Administration on delaying or shifting funds.

One of them we don't think is a good idea, and frankly, we want to take actions to reverse that. Related to student housing. We know it's so much of a factor to get students to success. It has a multiplier impact, of course, on dealing with our housing crisis in California, as well as providing good paying jobs for these projects. And so we'll be looking for other ideas how we can green light these housing construction projects for higher education as we finalize our budget.

So with that, we have two panels today. One is focused on the governor's 22,23 budget proposals. We'll hear from the Department of Finance and LAO, and then we'll hear from our segments, their community colleges, our CSU and our UC. But before we begin, any comments from any of the Committee Members? Seeing none. Mr. Fong. Welcome Mr. Fong, to budget sub two.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, and good morning to each and every one of you. Look forward to being on this Committee and working with you and your leadership and everyone here to address declining enrollment, looking at student housing needs and also basic needs. Also have concerns about the delays in the $250,000,000 for the grants and $900 million in the Revolving Loan Fund. But look forward to working with the chair, our colleagues and Administration to find solutions. And thank you for everyone for being here today. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Ting. You're good. Okay. Thank you. Let's begin. Let's bring up Department of Finance and LAO.

Good morning. Jack Swalt, Department of Finance I appreciate the opportunity to present and discuss the Governor's Budget proposal as it relates to higher education with the Subcommitee today. I'll begin by outlining the progress the Administration, together with our partners the UC and CSU, have made and our plans for the next fiscal year. At a macro level, the state faces a very different fiscal situation presently than the past two years.

The Governor's Budget addresses the fiscal challenges, notably a roughly $20 billion deficit, prudently, while also maintaining the course set in the compact agreements between the Administration and our public institutions of higher education. That continued investment in the second year of this agreement represents a 5% base increase in ongoing General Fund 215.5 million for the University of California and 227.3 million for California State University that will expand access, affordability, equity and student success.

Both segments have submitted progress reports on the goals outlined in the compacts and their strategies to meet these goals. Both systems are committed to these agreements, and we look forward to working together over the next four years to reach these targets. One area we are monitoring very closely, however, is enrollment. The Administration continues to expect UC and CSU to grow resident undergraduate enrollment by 1% each year.

The national trend towards declining enrollment in postsecondary institutions has proven to be a headwind, with UC remaining relatively stable in total, full time equivalent students and the CSU and community colleges seeing declines. We remain confident in the ability of the segments to meet these targets and, following consultation with each of them, believe that they are working in good faith to do so.

Although not part of the compact, we have also proposed a trailer Bill that would require the UCLA campus, as a condition of receiving 20 million to receive offer associate degrees for transfer pathways for students seeking to transfer from our California community colleges and that the campus participate in the Transfer Admission guarantee program or TAG program that furthers the administration's goals of increasing access and better aligning our systems of higher education.

The Governor's Budget also continues funding to reduce the number of nonresident undergraduate students in favor of California resident students at the Berkeley, San Diego and Los Angeles campuses. In the current year, UC received 31 million ongoing General Fund to support the transition of approximately 900 seats, and we have received data that shows that UC is meeting that target. The Governor's Budget proposes another 30 million ongoing General Fund in this year to continue that work.

Outside of the compacts our administration's budget proposal makes some changes to some previously planned capital projects at UC. Our proposal would pause 83 million onetime General Fund for expansion projects at UC Merced and UC Riverside and 83 million onetime General Fund for UC Berkeley's Clean Energy Campus project in 2023,24. Instead, that funding would be provided in the following fiscal year for a total of 166,000,000 for each initiative in 2024,25.

Similarly, our plan reduces planned expenditures on the Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at the UCLA campus by 100 million General Fund in 2022,23 and 100,000,000 one time General Fund in 23,24 and instead provides those resources in 2024,25. The administration's proposal also makes changes to six capital projects at CSU totaling 404.8 million. One time General Fund.

The Governor's Budget would eliminate that support funding and instead finance those projects with CSU bonds and provide 27 million ongoing General Fund to support debt costs associated with that bond. This is similar to the administration's 2019 budget approach of providing ongoing General Fund to support bond debt costs at UC Riverside and UC Merced for their medical school projects.

The Governor's Budget provides 6.5 million in 23,24 to support the UC Riverside project, and the Administration intends to provide 14.5 million ongoing General Fund beginning in 2024,25 to support the project at UC Merced. We are also continuing the practice of backfilling declining Proposition 56 tobacco tax revenues that support graduate medical education at a level of $40 million, as outlined as a fixed allocation in the Prop. 56 formula.

This backfill is projected to be 9.8 million in the budget year, up about 4 million from the previous year. Thank you and I will now see the floor to my colleague Michelle Nguyen to present on California community colleges and student housing.

Hi, thanks Jack. Good morning chair and Members. My name is Michelle Nguyen with the Department of Finance. I'll cover investments included at the Governor's Budget related to the California Community colleges and student housing. As noted by my colleague in the previous presentation, this Governor's Budget is facing a very different revenue outlook from the last two governor's budgets that we've had. This has contributed to the Governor's Budget forecasting an overall gap in resources for the state budget exceeding $20 billion in 2023,24.

However, in spite of this projected revenue decline, I want to note that the Governor's Budget continues to provide support for the California community colleges, in large part due to prudent fiscal planning and the use of one time funds within the Proposition 98 guarantee.

This support is also consistent with the administration's continued support for the community Colleges Multiyear Roadmap, which is an agreement that was established in the 2022 Budget act between the Administration and the community colleges that focuses on promoting equity and student success and enhancing the system's ability to prepare students for the state's future.

I'll now mention the specific investments made at the Governor's Budget, which include the following Proposition 98 General Fund investments 652.6 million for an 8.13% cost of living adjustment for community college apportionments provided through the student centered funding formula. I'll also note that in spite of the revenue decline for the state budget, the Governor's Budget proposes no reductions to community college apportionments.

200,000,000 one time for enrollment, outreach and retention efforts building upon previous dollars allocated in the 2021, in the 2021 and 2022 budgets, a decrease of 213,000,000 one time for deferred maintenance needs 14,000,000 one time to support the Administration of workforce training grants in collaboration with CalFire.

These funds are intended to support industries around forest health and resilience by building up the workforce in these fields. 275,000, of which 75,000 is one time to develop a community college chief business officer professional development and learning program run through FICMAT to improve community college district leadership capacity and fiscal accountability. And I'll now mention the intersegmental student housing investments that are impacted by the Governor's Budget for the Higher Education Student Housing grant program.

From prior budget acts, there was a planned investment of 750,000,000 one time General Fund for 23,24 which is the budget year.

However, the Governor's Budget now proposes 500,000,000 one time for the budget year and 250 one time for 2024,25 budget year one in an effort to address the gap of resources for the state budget. For the student Housing Revolving Loan program, which was established in the 2022 Budget act with intent language to appropriate 900,000,000 one time General Fund in 2023,24 and another 900,000,000 one time General Fund in 2024,25. Again to help address the state's budget whole.

The Governor's Budget delays implementation of this program by a year and proposed is 650 million one time in 2024,25 and 1.15 billion one time in 2025,26. Finally, I will close with several non fiscal items of note in this budget for the community colleges. First, on enrollment for the community colleges. As I mentioned earlier, the Governor's Budget proposes an additional 200 million one time for enrollment, retention and recruitment, and that is in response to the Administration continuing to be concerned about enrollment at the community colleges.

The Administration is monitoring district level enrollment trends to see if districts begin to regain some of the enrollment loss during the pandemic. As such, the Governor's Budget includes messaging in the higher education budget chapter that the Administration will work with stakeholders to consider options to begin adjusting district budgets should a district not demonstrate that they are regaining enrollment entering the 2024,25 academic year. This is something more for the next budget cycle that we wanted to include in messaging at this Governor's Budget.

We understand that the pandemic exacerbated trends of declining enrollment that have been taking place since the great Recession, but we wanted to reiterate that it is the administration's perspective that it is imperative for districts to continue in their efforts to retain, re enroll, and conduct outreach to new students.

Second, the Administration intends to include a mechanism in the spring to further support the goals of the community college roadmap, and that would be introducing a mechanism to provide categorical spending and reporting flexibility for districts making progress towards community college roadmap goals. The idea for this proposal would be that districts making progress would be able to submit a streamlined report for the specified programs and to spend funds flexibly across those programs.

Third, and finally, in furtherance of the roadmap and the compacts, we include a request to community colleges to establish dual enrollment agreements with all applicable LEAS within their community college district service area if they have not done so already.

And we are also requesting that all community colleges develop and offer a one unit service learning course that all high school students would have the ability to access through dual enrollment agreements to encourage and enable high school students to volunteer in their local communities and participate in civic engagement. And with that, we're happy to answer any questions that you might have about proposals for higher education included in this budget. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll go first to LAO and then we'll have questions for both.

Good morning. Jennifer Pacella from the Legislative Analyst Office. Over the past couple of months, we've released a series of briefs on the higher ed budget. We started with the higher ed overview, subsequently released briefs on CSU and UC. Later this week, we'll release briefs on the community colleges and CSAC. I know you'll be discussing segment specific issues and coming hearings, so I'll focus today on just a few big picture higher education issues.

So we do our higher end analysis, obviously within the context of the state budget condition. So just as a recap, we have a mid size budget deficit. We originally estimated it at 18 billion. Revenues continue to come in a bit weaker than projected. We're now at about 25 billion. That estimate will continue to change as we all collect new information on revenues and expenditures under the Governor's Budget.

The Administration has estimated not only a budget deficit for 23,24 but also for the subsequent few years, they've estimated a deficit of 9 billion in 24,25 9 billion in 25,26 4 billion in 26,27. So, as you know, our office recommends adopting a budget that's not only balanced in the budget year is constitutionally required, but that remains in balanced sense over the next several years. Your options for dealing with the deficit now are much better than they'll be a year from now.

You do have the ability now to rescind some one time spending a year from now, some of those options will no longer be available. So, turning to our assessment of the governor's higher education budget proposals, as you've heard, he has notably fewer budget proposals in higher education this year than past years. He's not launching many new initiatives. He's mostly focused on the segment's core operations. On the onetime side, he also has very little new onetime spending.

The largest is onetime spending for the middle class scholarship program that was part of last year's budget agreement. Most of the governor's proposed onetime actions are not on the spending increase side, but on the budget solution side. You have a list of all of those solutions on page nine of your agenda. As you can see, those budget solutions, they give the state 2.3 billion in General Fund savings in the near term, but they start generating General Fund costs as soon as 24,25.

So there's 2.3 billion in savings, but then 2 billion in costs that materialize over the 24,25 through 26,27 period. Regarding the governor's proposed ongoing base increases for the segments, you've heard that the Governor has an 8.13% COLA proposed for community college apportionments and 5% base General Fund increases proposed for CSU and UC. The Community college COLA is linked to a price index. We have some updated information on that price index, and the COLA as estimated today is at 8.4%, so higher than January.

We would suggest that you consider the January proposed rates as an upper bound. So we even so, having said that, having suggested that you treat those January rates as an upper bound, we recognize that all of UC and CSU's projected cost increases will not be able to be accommodated with the 5% increase. We also recognize that inflation remains elevated. All of the segments will face salary pressures that they feel like they won't be able to entirely accommodate within the 5% base increases.

So even within those original proposed January rate increases, there'll be difficult choices. The segments you have to make. However, the segments will, within those base increases, be able to accommodate some salary increases, pension rate increases, health care cost increases, and some enrollment increases. Regarding the Governor's Budget solutions, we've identified options for you to expand the list and change the list so in terms of expansion, you could get some additional one time budget solution in the enrollment area.

Sweeping some of the unearned enrollment funds this year will be amongst the least disruptive options before you. In this case, you're just really aligning funding to when the students arrive. Once the segments do achieve enrollment targets, you can provide resources at that time regarding changes to the list. Rather than delaying some capital outlay funds, we suggest you consider removing some of those funds. Most projects are in very early planning stages. Some of them lack justification based upon enrollment projections or existing space utilization.

Some have very little information regarding basic information on schedule, scope and cost. There is one project before you that did provide justification based upon its existing space utilization. That's the UC Riverside new academic building. In this case, if you thought it was UC's most pressing capital priority and you wanted to move forward with it, we do recommend you go ahead and do that so that cost escalation isn't a further factor in the project.

We'd also encourage you to think about funding it through the typical method, which is having UC sell University bonds and then having the state support the debt service. You could do that through either UC's base budget, as is the typical process, or you could do it through a special General Fund allocation. This is the mechanism that the Governor largely is proposing for CSU projects. In wrapping up all three segments will also be affected by your decisions on Cal grants and middle class scholarships.

Given the state's budget condition, the scheduled Cal grant expansion is very unlikely to be triggered. The middle class scholarship expansion for 23,24 is supported with onetime funds. It also is very unlikely it'll be difficult to sustain that moving forward. It'll be disruptive in 24,25 if continuing students get lower middle class scholarship grants at that time.

So, recognizing the difficult trade offs at stake, we'd recommend you decide as part of this year's state budget deliberations what expansions you want to make on Cal grants and middle class scholarships that you don't use triggers or one time funds to do it. You just decide amongst your priorities what you would like to expand again. Again our main concern is that with triggers and one time spending, there's confusion for students and their families, for financial aid, campus administrators and counselors.

So I'd be happy to answer any questions on these overarching higher education issues.

Questions from Committee Members. Mr. Alvarez.

Thank you very much for your presentation to all of you. I have a question on the 200 $1.0 million program for the community colleges to deal with retention or with enrollment growth. When will we see specifics on that proposed program?

Specifics on the program?

Yeah.

Well, the provisional language for the program is already posted online. It's very similar to the language for the 2021 and 2022 Budget act investments. The funds are provided rather flexibly for the colleges to use on a variety of different strategies on how to approach retention and enrollment. There's also language that authorizes, I think, up to 10% for a statewide strategy, statewide use of those funds.

Okay. I would just note for the Department and the community college system in some parts of our state, like the one that I represent down by the border, we have a lot of families that have left the state to live south of the border because it has become more affordable.

I'd like to have a discussion with the Department more about how we can tap into that student base to help with our enrollment issues, particularly in facilities or at campuses that are along the border that perhaps might find challenges in attracting some of those students, but they are nonetheless, perhaps students that would have been in our system anyway. So I'd like to follow up with whoever's interested in that concept. I'd look forward to having that conversation with you on the dual enrollment participation by LEAS.

I heard, Ms. Nguyen, I think you mentioned this one. Are we tracking that aleady? Youi said, you mentioned something about tracking it or figuring out where we stand. Do you have an idea of that yet? Is there going to be an assessment at some point? Has there been one made already to see if all the LEAS are participating?

I'd have to, probably would have to check with the chancellor's office on that. I think a lot of LEAS do have dual enrollment agreements with community college districts, but I don't think all do. And there are also different types of dual enrollment programs, too. There's, I believe, one called concurrent enrollment and another called CCAP, which stands for college and career access pathways. That one is specifically for underrepresented students in higher education.

So, yeah, I think part of the reason why we include that messaging for the Governor's Budget is that we don't believe that all of them do have agreements.

Can you tell me more about if there were any financial incentives to participate? Or give me a little just brief history on that.

So, for the community colleges, they do claim apportionments for students through these dual enrollment programs, the rate at which they are claiming apportionments for these students is at a higher rate than the typical rate within the funding formula right now.

Okay.

On the K 12 side, I'd have check.

No, that's okay. Thank you. One of the major, or not major, but new expanded programs that the LAL points out, there's a list of several major initiatives that we should, as a Legislature be looking at how it's going. One that caught my attention is the transfer and common course numbering reforms. Is there anyone who can speak to that or can you speak to that?

To my understanding, the 65 million that the state, the Governor proposed last year and that the state funded was for a variety of activities associated with ABA 928, the Berman Bill. The main core of that is an intersegmental Committee that's supposed to revisit lower division courses to align and have a single GE General education pathway for lower division students. Our understanding is the Committee is up and running and is having conversations. We have been trying to keep apprised of how much spending is spent to date.

I do not think we'd have to check to see, of the 65 million how much remains available, but it is dedicated to those activities for helping colleges to actually implement the new pathway once it is developed. But I think it's still in the development stage. So I would suspect not a lot of the implementation, if any, has been spent to date.

Continuing on the trend of transfer, hearing that theme, for me, it's an important issue. The UCLA concept of $20 million for guaranteed admission, I think that's like the TAG program. Can Department of Finance share with me the thinking behind targeting just UCLA and not some of other impacted campuses like San Diego, Berkeley, and the UC system, and the CSU system, San Diego and others that are also really impacted and could use some transfer guarantee programs.

Yes, the Administration is choosing to advance this proposal at UCLA. UCLA is a considerable campus, very important, and we anticipate that our proposal will increase access and equity at that campus. We're looking forward with partnering with UC to do.

And can you share, were there considerations for other UCs to participate? Was this a UC recommendation?

This was not recommended to us by the UC. This is something we're going to give a try and it's in our budget proposal for this year, and should it be successful, it may be replicated elsewhere. That will be part of future conversations around this and other initiatives the Administration undertakes to improve the alignment between our segments of public and private education, and to improve the transfer process.

All right. Look forward to hearing more about that and the other questions. Thank you.

Okay, questions. All right, I have three. First, on the last issue with Mr. Alvarez. We'll get to this with the UC with our hearing, but the community college transfer process has always been way too complicated for, frankly, way too many students. For decades, we've dibbled and dabbled. And so this guaranteed transfer proposal for UCLA is a good idea. But why not the other eight UC's, Undergraduate UC's. So if we should do it for one, we should do it for the other eight.

And then for the community college COLA issue, I understand that the COLA is not based upon money. It's a formula. And obviously the cost of milk and gas and eggs and inflation, it's on the news every day. So go figure that if inflation is high, that the COLA formula is high. But for them, they say it's great for our TK-12 schools and community colleges, eight and a half percent is amazing. It's somewhat unfair,

no offense to community colleges and our public schools. But like childcare and health care, their call in the budget is zero and their cost of energy, and gas, and milk, and eggs, or what have you is equal, same. So that's more of a kind of a debate for us and the Legislature. Why did some get a guaranteed COLA, some others? You're saying that potentially the COLA formula would go up in January? What if we can't afford that?

Has there ever been a case where we haven't been able to pay the tagged COLA amount?

Yes. Since the creation of 98, there have been several years where the statutory COLA rate was higher than the state believed at the time it could afford. Under current state law, finance has the authority to automatically adjust the COLA rate down to the level they think the 98 guarantee can support. You also have the decision from a policy perspective to set the rate. It is done in statute. We just have one more quarter of data than finance had when they established the rate.

8.4, I think, is the highest rate that would have ever been offered under 98. Even 8.1 will be the highest rate. I think the rate you provided last year at 6.56 was the highest, if not amongst the highest rates. So, yeah, this will be an important decision before you.

We are trying to signal to you and others that even the 8.13% is quite a high rate and it could be difficult to sustain in all future years with still enough funding to Fund those COLAs that will emerge for those years.

Okay, thank you. And then on the student housing issue, college student housing, we could spend a whole hearing on that. I know Mr. Fong and I have talked about that, but this is a subset of today's hearing as the agenda talks about. It's a major issue for students. It's the highest cost that students face right now. And read a story last week about in the new Cal Poly up in Humboldt, there's no housing for those students, and there's crazy ideas.

Sort of put them on some housing ideas that really don't really make sense. What was it, a boat or something? Yeah, go figure. So this truly is a need and the last couple of years we said, you know what? For the first time, California should step in and lean in and do what we can to Fund programs.

And so we have these two programs and just want to ask LAO just from assuming that there's no new money, and potentially there could be a massive infusion of tax revenue coming in the next few months, and the budget scenario could be different or it could get worse. But assuming that it stays exactly the same, we have the grant program, which was a year before the revolving loan fund, and some of the grant program is obviously more successful out of the gate.

For UC and CSU, which have projects ready to go, the community colleges is more of a hypothetical. It would be nice to have some community college housing projects. Some are more realistic than others. Frankly, a lot of them just don't make financial sense. It's just not in the business model for community colleges for a variety of reasons. So we're sitting on some of that money that's probably not ripe.

So hypothetically, could we swap that, knowing that the demand for UC and CSU is like, bam, ready to go, and we have students who are struggling, know, don't have places to go when we expand enrollment at some of our campuses. And that, frankly, a revolving Fund is the one that pays us back down the road anyway. So it's a fund that's going to keep replenishing to take care of this need for generations down the road?

So, hypothetical, could you do like a swap with those monies and put the revolving money up front and delay the other money that's really not needed right now anyway?

Yeah, just a few factors to consider. You've got so many options before you. As of February 1, the segments were required under state law to submit proposals for the grant program. You do have proposals from UC and CSU. There are several new projects that they believe with state backing, they could get off the ground. It'll still take several years till they get to construction, but this will allow them to build a financially feasible plan. The colleges have yet to submit theirs.

They're in the process of scoring theirs, but they are running a bit behind statutory schedule. That is because UC and CSU, as you noted, have much more robust, long standing housing programs such that they can get projects up and moving more quickly.

Having said that, again, we estimated that if the state did no one time spending, effectively rescinded all of it for the next three years that's already scheduled and suspended deposits into the budget stabilization account, it very likely would get its budget back in balance for the next several years.

And again, as you noted, things can change over several months when it comes to priorities between the grant and the revolving loan program or exactly how much you provide in any given year moving forward, that's completely under your purview, within the basic architecture of all of your decisions. As you indicated, there is a trade off with the revolving loan Fund because it's paid back, it just functions differently than the grant program.

Effectively campuses are putting up a little bit more, but it's still that last dollar in to help them with financial feasibility. So you might argue a little bit more cost effective.

Yeah, so that's certainly something that we'd consider. And I guess there's 550 of the community college grant fund that's sitting there that doesn't look like it's ready anyway. So it's the 900 million that we're foregoing. So we could get roughly two thirds of the way there.

Yes, so as I recall, of the remaining allotment, it is split 50 for the colleges, 30 for CSU and 20 for UC. UC, for example, only has 48 million left. It's not enough to do, I think almost enough to do one or two of their projects, but the others are substantially more.

So, yes, you can, as you are starting to do, craft the housing package however you would like it, try to get the most out of it, try to dedicate it to the segments who you think would get the greatest benefit from adding beds. Again, UC and CSU have long standing programs where they have been able to do financially feasible projects at some times.

So you might, as you are, think just about what is the state funding needed to help make their plans financially feasible as opposed to again giving them 100% financing.

Okay, thank you. And lastly, for the LAO on this enrollment issue. So it's interesting. So the CSU enrollment is dropping and community college dropping, and UC enrollment is not, and demand is ever increasing from UC. And if there's one thing that we know about the University of California and our newspaper and our media, every year there's two stories record applications and then, frankly, record number of rejections from students who have like 4.2 GPAs who can't get in to UC.

So the past few weeks, it was perplexing when we saw that the enrollment actually is down at UC. We're like, doesn't make sense. We have students who are bang at the door who have 4.2 GPAs and can't get in, and we're under enrolling UC. So UC says, well, there's a, and they're going to talk about this in a second, a plausible reason for this, that the number of units students were taking has dropped.

Granted, ever such small drop, it's like one-tenth of one unit or something like that, as Mr. Drake's nodding out there. So on the totality that makes a difference of a couple thousand students. And so I guess the notion is we can change that and the behavior will change in a year or two, but we'll have to enroll a bigger bump of students next year and then eventually it will adjust.

Do we think that that is accurate or do we need to rethink the number of students that we actually admit in the first place and hopefully get an acceptance letter from a UC campus for our amazing high school students?

Yeah, there are factors, as you mentioned, that likely will just take time to recalibrate. So all of the segments, I think, are seeing a slight reduction in credit load. So it's taking students a bit longer to get through and it's lowering their full time equivalent count. They're also seeing slight drops in retention. Well, slight to notable drops in retention rates, which is also lowering the size of their continuing cohorts. Transfers, as you noted, are going down.

The community college pipeline is effectively just having a lagged effect. It's even having that effect at UC with their transfer applications being affected. Having said that, UC also is a more complicated story because you have some campuses like UCLA, that took more transfer students in fall of 22. So they bucked the trend that you're seeing across much of the rest of the state.

And so it's because of really where students want to go within the UC system, where they will choose to go if they don't get accepted to their first or second choice campus. That's also making your jobs more difficult because you're seeing all of that student behavior, even if you provide more growth. But they don't get into their first or second choice campus, they might end up not in the UC system.

Okay, we'll hear more about this when the system comes up. Mr. Ting.

Thanks. Mr. Chair, I was just going to sort of direct question to both finance and Lao regarding enrollment. Obviously, it's concerning to see the drop in enrollment for CSU as well as the community colleges. Do you have any ideas as to why that's occurring and what can be done to reverse it?

So I think, in summary, again, it's at least three factors. It's the job market is strong, and that means community college enrollment is down, and that means transfers to the universities in a lagged fashion one or two years later are falling, and it'll take some time for something to change with the job market, something to change with community college enrollment, for that pipeline of two or three years later entering the universities to change.

Whether it was just the COVID experience or some other factors, we know credit bearing is down, credit loads are down, and retention rates are down. How long it'll take for student behavior to sort of change students to feel better prepared and take more courses, hang around for sophomore and junior year. We don't know how long that will take, whether it's going to bounce right back in a year or two, but those are the key factors affecting demographics.

High school graduates are also down slightly, but they're expected to grow like half a percentage point next year. But there's just not much. And these are national trends as well. If you look around the country over the last 10 years, higher education enrollment has fallen, I think, at least a million students nationwide. So California is operating in these larger national trends, including the pandemic. UC will be the quickest to rebound. Students want to go there, you add seats.

Apart from this issue of being able to get into the most neglective campuses, you might be able to grow that segment more quickly. Those students are a little bit less responsive to the job market, but it'll be much more difficult at the colleges. And CSU is sort of smacked in between dealing with all of these factors.

Any thoughts? No more digital thoughts. Just to follow up. So one of the concerns that I've had regarding community colleges, I mean, one of the biggest changes during the pandemic was community colleges went entirely virtual. And they've been very slow to - excuse me - they've been slow to come back to in person in classes. And in fact, just looking at page 12 of their college attendance survey, 19% of college students, based on the survey, said they could not learn in an online environment. So how much do you think learning online is impacting these students?

When we talk with the colleges, we get a sort of mixed or complicated story. On the one hand, when they offer an in person course next to an online course, they've said in most instances, they have more demand for the online course, and the online course fills up first. I think there's also some research suggesting with particular kinds of students, they don't want the online version.

So I think what colleges are trying to do is survey students, try out new things with their catalog such that they have sufficient in person offerings for those who really want to be on campus having those experiences, but also still have online for those who work. It's hard for them to schedule around school who have family and other obligations.

Great. Thank you. Just to finance, regarding that UCLA transfer program, can you give us a sense of how that was developed?

This proposal is part of a larger initiative to improve alignment among public sectors and private sectors of higher education and improve student access and equity. UCLA is a significant campus in the system, and that is why we decided to move forward with this concept.

But where'd the idea come from?

We have many conversations with a number of folks in our budget development process. I don't want to delve too deeply into the deliberations the Administration makes in determining how we structure the budget.

So it came from within the Administration or came from. It didn't come from UCLA. So did it come from a academic?

This proposal came as part of the Governor's Budget, which ultimately does mean it was put forward by the Administration. Yes.

And you don't want to tell us where the idea came from?

I'm not sure that I know particularly where it did come from. We developed this strategy. We think it's a great strategy, and we look forward to having a further discussion on this as we move forward on this plan.

Would you mind getting back to the Committee and letting us know?

Sure thing.

Thank you. I'm good. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you. I think that's it for this panel. Thank you so much. We'll bring up now representatives from the UC, CSU and community colleges.

I thank you. We have, as Mr. Alverez noted, two interims and permanent leader for the UC. But my understanding is our community colleges are going to announce their leader within a number of days or hours. Is today the day? Not today, but either way, we're glad to have you here as well. So let's start on the left with President Drake from the University of California.

Good morning, Chair McCarty and Members of the Committee. Nice to see you and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity today to discuss our common vision for the University of California and the University's efforts to support the needs and priorities of our state.

My priorities for the University are to expand student opportunity and academic excellence, to strengthen an inclusive, respectful, and safe University community, to lead on the big changes - challenges facing California like climate change, and to serve the people of California by promoting health across the state, including in our most vulnerable communities. These priorities are based on the needs of California and Californians and all that we do.

And the University seeks to contribute solutions to the significant issues facing our state and to continually evolve to serve our University community and the people of California. Working toward equity and justice is a critical part of our vision for a University that serves all of California. This ideal is woven into the University's work, and we believe that each member of the University community is responsible for moving forward toward that goal. Equity and inclusion are key motivators for the University's compact with the Governor.

The compact is centered on the key pillars of access, student success, debt free education, and intersegmental collaboration, goals I know that I share with the Legislature as well. The 5% base budget increase proposed by the Governor will provide much needed budget stability and allow our campuses to admit more students. It will also enable us to make critical long term investments in our students, faculty, research and infrastructure.

I'm grateful to Governor Newsom for the proposed funding increase, and I ask for your support in providing these funds to the University. As we work to build a more just and equitable University, we want to increase the number of students, particularly California students, who have the opportunity to attend one of our campuses. Over the next decade, we plan to steadily grow the University's enrollment by more than 23,000 state supported students.

I'm committed to providing equitable opportunities to Californians by continually increasing access to a University of California education. This will be possible with the support from the compact and the Legislature, and will build on the over 13,000 California undergraduate students and growth that the Legislature has funded since 2017. UC campuses were able to hold enrollment steady through the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of intense uncertainty and upheaval, and this was not the case for many universities across the country.

The University of California admitted a record number of California first year students for the fall of 2022, with an increase in the number of underrepresented students as well. The proposed 2023/2024 5% base budget increase will support the addition of over 2000 more California undergraduates to our campuses.

But that will not be the end of our growth. For the 23/24 year UC campuses are planning to grow by over 4200 California undergraduates, and this figure includes the replacement of 900 nonresident students with California residents at our Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses. This robust undergraduate growth will happen in tandem with graduate enrollment growth. Our compact agreement with the Governor includes a growing graduate student enrollment by 2500 students by the year 2026/27 and we are working hard to achieve the agreed benchmarks.

Growing enrollment must be accompanied by efforts to nurture students' success for all. It's not enough to simply increase the number of students we serve. We must take steps to ensure that these new students have access to the academic opportunities and student support services that make a UC education so unique and desirable. The University has taken steps to promote student success and a positive student experience, including the establishment of basic needs centers on all of our campuses and increasing the number of mental health counselors available to students.

We're also in the process of establishing service centers for former foster youth and for carceral system impacted students on all of our undergraduate campuses. This growing support and infrastructure can help our students stay enrolled and complete their degrees in a timely fashion. In partnership with the Legislature and the Governor, I'm seeking ways to expand affordability for the University of California. My goal is to offer a path to a debt free UC education to all California undergraduates by 2030.

We're making progress toward this goal thanks to the significant new investments in state program enhancements created by the Legislature. Appreciate it. The simplified Cal Grant program will provide additional assistance to older students and the expanded middle class scholarship will provide critical cost of attendance funding to low and middle income students.

Along with recent increases in Federal Pell Grants, these state programs will provide critical assistance to California students, particularly those who are pursuing a UC education, and this can lead to a successful career path and economic stability. Providing robust financial assistance to students while they are pursuing their degrees allows them to focus on learning and personal growth during their time at the University. Decreasing debt increases students flexibility as they consider what path to take after graduation, opening opportunities in areas from entrepreneurship to public service.

Increasing the number of students who graduate without debt is not just good for the students and their families, it's good for the state. Lastly, our efforts to prioritize collaboration with our public higher education partners, the California State University and the California Community Colleges. A prime example of our inter segmental collaboration is the cradle to career system. A partnership between the Governor, state agencies and the public higher education segments.

The system will deliver critical information on education, financial aid and career outcomes to prepare students to reach their college and career goals. We appreciate the opportunity to partner with the state in this way, and we look forward to collaborating on the work ahead. At the University of California, we are driven by our public service mission and commitment to California and everything we do.

We are committed to continuing to provide life changing educational opportunities, to producing cutting edge research solutions, and to offering top rated health care for Californians. From bringing agricultural programs to all 58 counties, to fostering economic growth throughout California, we're working every day to ensure that the positive impact of the University of California is felt in every corner of the state. Stable funding for the University is critical to our ability to keep up this momentum and to improve the lives of everyone living in our great state.

I want to thank Chair McCarty and Members of the Budget Committee for your continued partnership. As we continue to strengthen and expand the reach of the University, we would not be able to have the impact we have without your support, and I appreciate your continued collaboration. I look forward to working with you this year and in the future to ensure that we continue to grow and serve California together. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. We'll now go to our interim chancellor for the CSU system, Jolene Koester.

Can you hit your mic? Wait 1 second.

I needed to push the button. Thank you. Good morning, and thank you, members of the Subcommittee, for the opportunity to speak with you today alongside my esteemed colleagues from the University of California and the community colleges. As Chair McCarty said, my name is Jolene Koester and am the Interim Chancellor of the California State University System. Since this is my first opportunity to appear before this body, allow me to begin with a few more personal introductory comments.

It's been my honor to serve as the interim chancellor for less than one year. However, my career in the California State University spans more than four decades. Two of the university campuses, California State University Sacramento and California State University Northridge, were my homes for many years. I served those universities in a variety of academic and administrative leadership positions, including almost 12 years as the President of the Northridge University, or CSUN.

Since retiring from CSUN in December 2011, I've been providing executive coaching service to literally hundreds of university presidents and their executive teams across the nation. And yes, of course, many within the California State University. With that perspective and experience, I agreed to return as interim chancellor for one simple reason. I believe in the CSU's unique power. That unique power transforms lives and communities, and frankly drives California's economic and social prosperity.

If you aren't yet an enthusiastic and wholehearted believer in the CSU, allow me to briefly point out some of the reasons why I would ask you to become that true believer. The CSU is an open escalator to opportunity. It is this nation's most powerful driver of social mobility, with the universities in this system regularly appearing at the top of national rankings for graduating economically disadvantaged students into well-paying jobs.

Those well paying jobs in many cases, break generational cycles of poverty, wholly and permanently transforming entire family trees. And as for powering California's prosperity, we know that our state's educated workforce is the most important advantage the state has. This state, which is soon to become the world's fourth largest economy, this unparalleled workforce is this business community's greatest competitive advantage.

As the nation's largest four-year public university, the CSU fuels that workforce at an unmatched scale and with a vibrant and dynamic diversity that matches this state's population. In fact, one out of every 10 California employees is a Cal State graduate.

Through the pandemic, and yes, despite a time of transition in executive leadership, the CSU has continued to deliver on its mission, awarding nearly 130,000 high-quality, high-value degrees in 2022, with graduation rates at or near all-time highs at our universities and for most student groups. My primary job as the interim chancellor is to build a glide path for the next regularly appointed chancellor so that leader, your leader, is positioned to accelerate the CSU's positive momentum in key priority areas.

First, student success will be maintained as the CSU's primary educational goal. We want to do that while advancing educational equity. Two, we want to create safe and supportive environments for learning and discovery. Three, of note to all of you and of interest will be in reimagining our approaches to enrollment management and resource allocation.

And finally, but not any less important, is our need to recruit and retain and fairly compensate a diverse, world class team of faculty and staff who reflect and who connect with the students that we serve.

We, like my colleague, want to express our gratitude for Governor Newsom's recent budget proposal, which does honor the commitments of a multiyear compact that was announced last year, and he's done that despite the state's current fiscal challenges, the compact is an important milestone for California and for the CSU because it provides us with an invaluable element of financial sustainability and predictability for several years to come.

The budget proposal demonstrates the administration's firm commitment to higher education and, frankly, its unwavering belief in the mission of the CSU. And for that, those of us in the CSU are deeply appreciative. The compax budget augmentation will allow us to continue to advance many of the priorities I outlined a few moments ago. But of course, and as always, the CSU stands ready to do more for our current and future students, for our employees, and for the communities that we serve.

We have three areas of acute need. First, we must provide competitive salaries and benefits so that we can recruit and retain faculty and staff who support, inspire, and uplift our talented and diverse students. The CSU is committed to making progress in this area, but we must do so prudently, incrementally, and within the resources made available by this year's final state budget. We cannot compromise our academic mission because, second, we must continue to expand the work of Graduation Initiative 2025.

We want to support the CSU's mission to advance educational equity so that all of our students have an equal opportunity to earn the life-transforming benefits that have been demonstrated by earning a CSU degree. And finally, we want to ensure safe, modern, and sustainable facilities where teaching, learning, and student wellbeing can thrive. This committee is well aware of the conditions of many of our universities.

More than half of the buildings on our 23 university campuses are 40 years old, and they're in dire need of significant improvement or replacement. Before I wrap up, a couple of other issues that I know are top of mind for you, and they are for me as well. We've already discussed and heard the news of student enrollment challenges at the national level in terms of higher education, and now at the state level.

System-wide, the CSU projects that it will be more than 21,000 full-time equivalent students, or 6% now, rather than the 7% that we had originally projected. We're going to be 6% below our funded 22-23 resident target at the conclusion of the 22-23 year. Make no mistake, a sustained decline in enrollment throughout the CSU system would present fundamental and significant threats to our mission, to the very viability of our universities, and certainly to the future of the communities that we serve, and ultimately to this state.

This is a system-level issue that requires a coordinated and collective system response. We're focused not only on enrolling new students and helping them to maintain optimal unit loads, but we have also redoubled our efforts to retain our continuing students by providing the academic program and support services they need to succeed. In addition, we are working to re-enroll students who have left the university. We have also recently launched an enrollment target and budget reallocation plan.

This is a central element of our comprehensive and collective response. With this system allocating resources over time, reallocating resources, pardon me? We are going to align those resources with the reality of student demand, population demographics, and with enrollment trends that have, in reality, existed for several of these universities for several years. Finally, let me say it's critically important for the CSU to establish greater long-term fiscal predictability and sustainability.

The multi-year compact has already proven to be helpful in this regard, but the CSU's path to long-term fiscal stability must also address tuition, fees, and alternative revenue sources.

We established last summer a sustainable financial model workgroup whose core charge is to explore with depth and creativity two sides of this coin, both the cost of offering and presenting our universities, as well as on the other side, all potential revenue options and issue recommendations that will be presented and available to the next regularly appointed chancellor so that they are immediately equipped to engage additional stakeholders and take quick actions to adopt an innovative long term revenue plan.

Chair McCarty, community members, thanks again for the opportunity to address you today. I look forward to answering any of the questions you might have, but most importantly, please know that I am always available to discuss how the California State University can be a resource to you as you continue to explore ways to develop California's workforce, support public higher education, and address the myriad important issues currently facing our great state. The California State University's commitment is to the State of California. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Now, community colleges.

Good morning, board members. Good morning. Thank you, Chairman McCarty, for this opportunity to reconnect with you and all of the members of this Subcommittee, and, of course, Chairman Ting. It's an honor to be back in the Subcommittee where I started my public service career in the State of California in 2009. So thank you to the staff of this Subcommittee as well.

My name is Dr. Daisy Gonzalez, and I am the Interim Chancellor for California's Community Colleges, a system that I have now been serving for more than five years, and a system that open access to education to a young 16-year-old foster youth in this state. That is who I am. But I'm here to tell you a little bit about California's Community Colleges. We are, yes, the largest system of public higher education in this country.

But we are not just large in size and the importance to the state. We are also large in our reach, our regional reach across the largest state in this country. I'm proud to say that our 116 community colleges provide a pathway to greater economic and social mobility to every Californian that comes to our doors. Yes, we accept 100% of Californians that come to our doors and our campus leaders.

During this pandemic, our faculty, our staff, our student leaders have been dedicated not only in ensuring that students enroll, but that they can persist and they can complete, because that is the end goal and the purpose of higher education. The vision for success continues to drive and is our north star in the work that we do at California's community colleges. It was adopted by the Board of Governors in 2017.

So while there are changes at the highest levels of service for many public servants in that agency, you can rest assured that the Board of Governors maintains a commitment to student equity, success, and completion. The Governor's roadmap for the future, that is, the compact that was agreed upon with our system last year, intersects and builds on our commitments made in the vision for success.

And it works arm in arm with what we are asked to do for all of our regions, for equity gaps in this state, and for all of our students. In short, we are committed to reducing time to completion, closing our state equity gaps, improving educational outcomes, supporting inter-segmental data sharing, and establishing clearer pathways for transfer and careers. Now, the landscape has changed, just as Dr. Drake and Dr. Koester have shared with you, and I'm here to tell you the truth.

And to be completely honest, it has been difficult for all of our faculty and our staff, but even more difficult for California's community college students. California community college students are more likely to have dependents, one or more. And yes, that may mean taking care of a loved one. It also means that our students are more likely to have one job or more. So, not only did the landscape change, but who we serve, who will become the backbone of this state, has also shifted.

Today, I'm incredibly and immensely proud to tell you that we serve the most diverse set of students in this state. But here's who they are. Our students are largely students of color, 70%, this is where my recovering researcher comes in. 70% of our students are students of color. 66% are economically disadvantaged. 35% are first-generation college students. 41% are adult learners. 41% that means they are over the age of 25. 64% are working learners. That means they have one job or more.

That is who we serve. And during this pandemic, because of your leadership and your support over the last three years, we were able to ensure that our enrollment did not decline. Things could have been a lot worse. And here's what we did. Here's what our colleges did. They increased their hours of operations. Yes, even after 9:00 p.m. And certainly on weekends. They shortened their programs from 10 weeks to eight weeks, sometimes in six weeks. This was the innovation in workforce programs.

They provided our students with wraparound services from childcare to emergency housing, something that was not accessible to our students in the past. They expanded work-study opportunities. Why? Because if you recall that 64% of our students work part-time or more. So work study expanded during this pandemic. With your leadership and support, we're also able to offer free textbooks, additional technology access while building the infrastructure.

Additionally, our faculty and staff received professional development, and everyone worked together like a big family, hosting family days throughout the State of California to ensure that formally enrolled students and new students could also return to our colleges. But I'm here to tell you what it's going to take to recover into the future. Because while the enrollment is stabilizing, and I will share a little bit more about that shortly, our narrative needs to switch. And I'm glad that I showed up on time to this meeting.

Thank you for allowing me to sit here and listen to your stories and your questions. But the narrative is changing. Every single one of our students can succeed as our learning and our educational system transforms, as we are asking our colleges to operate. Yes, brick-and-mortar colleges and online colleges for the students that prefer learning online. Our students also are asking us for more. We are transforming our institutions to become institutions of unconditional belonging so that 100% of our students can succeed, not just enroll.

And as a part of the example of what we have been able to do during this pandemic, our progress continues to make unimaginable progress in closing equity gaps as it relates to equitable placement. That was a bill that was adopted in 2018, AB 705, and that progress is remarkable. Our student degree and completion maintained during this pandemic as well. 20% every single year since 2018. So historic number of students are completing at community colleges.

But more notably, you heard a little bit about the student center funding formula earlier. 62 of our districts, and we have 73, 62 have fully transitioned to the student-centered funding formula. And that means that we are making progress in serving low-income students and serving students who need us the most. But to continue to make progress, we can't lose sight of what our students need. That is why we went to our students. In your packet, I'm a visual learner, I included a report that shows you what our students are actually asking us for.

They want an education system to be flexible, adaptive, and that cares for them. They no longer want what is usual. So this is not about going into the higher education system of the past. No. Our students have different needs for teaching and learning and basic needs. And before this pandemic, 60% of our students said that they were food and housing insecure. 60, and 20% of them were homeless.

20% of our students were homeless before this pandemic. As our enrollment is increasing, I can tell you today confidently that we have a clearer picture. In fall of 2022 enrollment, while we saw the rest of this nation lose enrollment, community colleges were right there with everyone else. But today, this morning, we have 98.5% of our campuses reporting their enrollment for fall of 2022. And I can confidently tell you that our enrollment is stabilized.

69% of our colleges, 69 of them, saw 5% or more increases in enrollment. That is a really big improvement from the prior year, and it took a lot of hard work. 17 colleges saw 10% in increases in enrollment. Why? Because of the flexibility that I just described. The wraparound services, the innovation in program. For us and the work forward is that I can tell you that this system is stabilizing. We are also seeing race and gender gaps closing.

So what we had observed in the first year, we saw big differences in male students and female students. There was a big gap in fall of 2022, the gender gap closed in access to community colleges as well as race and ethnicity. Now, the one area that does persist are adult learners, and I shared the demographics with you.

Adult learners over the age of 25 continue to have challenges accessing higher education, likely because they are working part-time or more, have dependence, and they have additional wraparound services that we cannot grow fast enough, like childcare, to guide our next steps, our work is clearer, though. I shared with you a report that surveyed 116 community colleges. So we got students formally enrolled and currently enrolled, and we asked them questions. What will it take for you to return to your higher educational goals?

What does your education need to look like? And for the prospective students and our formally enrolled students, the picture is clear. And there's a lot of synergy. Our students expect a lot of flexibility in educational modalities. They have financial and nonfinancial assistance needs that they expect for their higher education segments to fulfill. I can summarize them shortly in this way. Our students are expecting workforce connections. That means paid work-based learning is a critical part of the future of California community colleges.

They're expecting student-centered scheduling course options. Yes, that means after hours. And they also want high flex. That means there are many different private colleges across the nation that are offering brick-and-mortar experiences, but also online in case you get sick or you have to take care of a loved one. That is called high flex. And the Board of Governors is in the middle of developing those regulations.

And the last component that came out of those surveys of more than 75,000 Californians that we surveyed was a growing demand for online offerings. As long as they had access to all the student services that exist at a brick and mortar, that should not surprise any of us. That means they want access to tutoring, mental health, all of the different components that they would have received at a brick-and-mortar college. Now, I'll begin to just summarize the state budget process.

I can tell you that we are immensely grateful for the leadership of this Subcommittee in past years in helping us build the infrastructure to ensure that we could serve all Californians that came to our doors. The proposal in front of you, the 23-24 state budget, offers you a reasonable proposal as we are anticipating a state budget shortfall.

We are grateful to Governor Newsom that California's Community College's resources are maintained and that we will be held accountable to ensure that we meet the goals of the roadmap for the future. We also deeply understand that you have very difficult decisions in the coming months. So understanding the fiscal circumstances of our state budget we do have concerns about the Governor's proposal to cancel 200 million in deferred maintenance costs.

This, of course, will mean that shovel-ready projects and campuses that need to be modernized will be put on hold. Lastly, I mentioned earlier housing. 20% of our students were homeless. Affordable student housing is a top priority for California's Community Colleges. Our board just wrapped up a college affordability task force that was important. We didn't want to build housing for the sake of building housing. It needed to be affordable and it needed to be sustainable.

That work is moving forward and I can tell you that all of the campuses that have been asked to build housing stand ready, whether they are building a project or they are shovel-ready, or they were in the middle of a project. Lastly, I will end by just sharing with you what the future looks like for our students. If you want us to be successful, we look forward to your partnership in key areas in service of student success.

The first is ensuring that when we have conversations about enrollment, we are also talking about persistence and success. If you want our students to succeed, we ask that you keep fighting for equitable Cal Grants in the State of California because our students can't wait any longer. If you want our students to succeed, we ask that you support us in innovating paid work-based learning will be critical for our students, the 64% of them that work part-time or more.

If you want us to reach our goals in the roadmap for the future, we ask that you help us implement all of the Legislature's priorities, specifically our applied baccalaureate degrees. And if you want us to be successful in closing equity gaps for the State of California, we ask that you join us in challenging the status quo, reimagining the future of higher education, and prioritizing funding for the largest system of public higher education in the state. Thank you very much.

I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Okay, a lot of information there packed in. Start with Mr. Ting.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just wanted to ask my questions because I have to get back upstairs. Just starting with Chancellor Gonzalez. Really appreciate the survey. I think it was great to actually have data on what students are thinking. I think it's very helpful. I'll just sort of repeat my question from earlier. I totally appreciate the fact that students, especially in your circumstances, are trying to juggle work, family, a variety of real-life issues.

They want flexibility, but they also, in their survey mentioned concern about having difficulty learning online. I've had concerns because of the three segments, community colleges have been the last ones to really come back full-time in person, I believe it's about 40% are online. So just wanted to get your feelings about online, because it seems to be one of the issues that seems to be, at least especially in my area in San Francisco, seems to be an issue as well.

So I just wanted to get your thoughts.

Thank you for the question and the concern. A lot of our colleges, particularly our workforce programs, never close down. So they remain open throughout the pandemic. You can't teach electrical pole work online as it relates to online programs, so there were a lot of general education programs, credit programs that did transition online in the middle of the pandemic. What we are looking to into the future is really focusing on what our students are asking us for, which is why we did our statewide survey.

The majority of our students right now want flexibility. That is online. However, it doesn't mean that online works for everyone, which is why you see that 19%. Our students want flexibility and what that means is that we have to be ready to do both. And so right now, the Board of Governors, the leadership that we are asking our colleges to do is continue to operate in person. That's our brick-and-mortar colleges. And as you're building the future of higher education, stay focused on that flexibility.

That's a part of why I share that we are developing high flex that is new to California's Community Colleges. But private colleges like Harvard, for-profits, have been mastering that for years. All it means is a student can take the same course in person, and maybe something bad happens, the car breaks down. They also can learn online. It just depends. So right now, we are asking our colleges to do both. It is asking a lot, but the reality is they were open.

They can do this, and we believe that they can do this with the support and the guidance of the state.

I appreciate the mindset of doing both, but it sounded like, based on your answer, that primarily it was the certificate programs, the vocational programs, like you said, culinary, auto body shop, electrical work, those are in person. But are you saying that to this point, most of the lecture courses are being done online?

No. As of fall of 2022, which is the data that we have, they are in person, some are online, and that is based on preferences. As the LAO shared earlier, our campuses are opening in-person classes, and then they can't fill the courses, and so they have to then switch to online. So it's based on student preferences.

What's the percentage?

I can follow up with the Committee afterwards.

Do you have a guess?

I hesitate because we have 73 districts and they all do it different.

So given the significant decline in enrollment, obviously, it's very concerning for the Committee. What else can be done to get those enrollments back up? Get enrollment numbers back up?

So I shared, and you have the data in front of you that our enrollment is stabilizing. And every single interview that we do with students or CEOs or faculty, they are all pointing to the same three things. And you have the survey data of what it would take for formally and prospective students to re-enroll. That is flexibility in teaching and learning modalities, right?

That's what we are sharing in terms of online or in-person being able to meet their basic needs, everything from childcare to emergency housing. That is what our students expect from us. And then the last component of this addresses the large majority of adult learners that we serve, and that is really paid workforce learning in the State of California. For many of our students, they're working one job or more. And so those are the three things that our students are asking us for.

And we totally support all three. We support the housing, we support the learning and the workforce part of it. But the enrollment numbers are 300,000 below pre-pandemic. And obviously pre-pandemic, none of those. We're making more progress now than we were in 2019. But yet you're 300,000 below 2019. So what can be done? I guess, because none of those things exist in 2019 that you're talking about.

So during this pandemic, you saw our world shut down. Many of our students joined the front lines. They were living in poverty. They gave up their education. And so when they tell us that those are the three things that they need, it's because our landscape changed before 2019. We're talking pandemic poverty, pandemic reality, so that what we can do is transforming our education system fast enough to meet the needs. The second big component is really meeting basic needs.

And then the last one is our workforce is shifting, and our students want to enter the workforce faster. So if we can deliver on an education system that helps them get to that job faster, then that is what they are looking for in their education. Now, in terms of the work of this Committee, it's really the basic needs, which is why I shared earlier, Cal Grant reform is still top, top need. The other big piece is continuing to support the innovation. Right?

Education will never be the same. And that is what we are seeing across the nation.

So are you saying that we're not going to see pre-pandemic enrollment without those items?

As long as I'm here, you will. I believe so. Our enrollment is stabilizing. Our colleges are in the middle of moving forward with April as California Community College Month. That will be a really big part of our enrollment strategy, bringing back and signaling all of the resources that have been adopted in the last three years so that Californians know exactly what resources exist for them.

I guess I'm asking because what I heard is all these things you're asking of us. I'm trying to get a better sense of what you're all doing so that you're driving enrollment back up.

We are leading in all of those areas. So you heard me say that we use our emergency dollars to decrease program lengths from 10 weeks to six weeks. So that's the area of getting them to the workforce much faster. In terms of basic needs, all the resources that you all provided us, in terms of basic need centers, child care at community colleges, the flexibility to build and meet those needs was critical. So that is the work that we are doing.

And then in terms of the other component is being able to on-ramp and create infrastructure at the statewide level, so being able to offer online education, but also regulations and professional development that can support the Californians who are working at our colleges.

Okay, thank you. I guess similar questions for Chancellor Koester, just with CSU enrollment down, obviously the projections are not getting back to 2021 levels till 2024-25. I guess what can be done to.

The CSU immediately when we received the projected numbers for this academic year, began an additional set of steps and continued to build on some steps that had already been underway prior to the beginning of this year. So there's a number of things. Very fundamentally, we are working with the institutions that have the lowest enrollment, providing very specialized support to them, so that at an individual university level, they can increase their campus enrollment through different kinds of recruiting and marketing techniques.

Similarly, we have asked all of the 23 university presidents to place a focus on increasing enrollment in a number of the key areas. Increasing the average unit load, which you've heard about several times this morning. That's a key area of work bringing back to the university. Students that have dropped out are no longer enrolled, and in the third area, to improve retention rates, which have for the first time decreased in certain grades of the university's population.

Another one of the challenges we have is that while we have positive enrollment pressures in some of our universities, we don't necessarily have the resources there to support that enrollment growth. So we've begun and implemented or described a plan that we will begin implementing in 24-25 when we will begin to move resources from some of those universities that are not producing the enrollment for which they currently have received a level of resources, and instead moving those to the universities that can produce the additional enrollment.

So I would simply say that we've got, multipronged is perhaps not quite an accurate word. We've got actions at every level of the university system, and the system office is much more actively engaged at this point in instrumental directing of enrollment and enrollment actions.

So just quick follow up. So appreciate that answer. The report, I guess, was that enrollment in 21-22 was 374,000. This is California residents. The projection was 357. I don't know if you actually have actuals. For the current year we're in. This is 22-23.

Right now we're projecting to be 6% under. And I do have the projections on a piece of paper in front of me. Yes, we're going to be about 6% below the funded enrollment target for this particular year.

Got it. Do you recall what that number. I'm just looking.

361,000 FTES, I believe.

Okay. Again, we want to be very supportive for both segments to push enrollment and whatever we can do. We know that there are a number of things that are out of your control, out of our control, but obviously we want to keep supporting both segments on this issue.

May I make one additional comment? We very much appreciated the Governor's recognition in his budget message that enrollment is a longer-term aspect of how our systems function. And we appreciate that because to move resources around to anticipate a particular enrollment level and then not receive it, we've already committed funds. So we very much appreciate recognizing that this is a longer-term proposition, but we fully commit to addressing this in the longer term as well.

Yeah, I think I'll just say for myself, I agree with that statement, too, and we appreciate all three segments really moving in that direction. I'll just say not all of your predecessors were as cooperative or as willing to move in this direction. So we really appreciate the fact that all three segments have really decided this is a major issue of focus and continue to really make progress. I know that it's challenging. Like I said, there are a number of factors.

The economy, life gets in the way, and we understand that. But we appreciate the fact that you have all three segments moving forward. And I don't have any questions for President Drake just because we've running out of time and appreciate, we've had ongoing conversations about how enrollment is going at UC, but also very much appreciate the work that's happening there. But thank you.

Okay. Thank you next Assemblyember Cervantes.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This question I have is actually one of two. This question is for President Drake. Thank you for being here today before the Committee. The governor's proposed budget includes a one-year delay in distributing funding for several capital outlay projects, including 83 million for facility expansions at UC Riverside and UC Merced. As you recall, this funding was largely in part of the Inland Rising Fund, requested by, championed by myself and two of my colleagues, Assemblymember Gray and Assemblymember Medina.

The purpose of this budget was to ask for help in creating a level playing field. A level playing field after decades of the state neglecting and underfunding both the Inland Empire and the Central Valley, which was manifested in these two UC campuses in these two regions. It is concerning to me, very concerning to me, to see funding for our inland regions delayed when the Governor's proposed budget does not delay funding in other parts of our state for other capital projects, for other institutions of higher education.

Can you explain the calculus in choosing to delay funding for UC Riverside and UC Merced while continuing to fund projects in more affluent parts of our state?

Our budget, in fact, included that funding, so it wasn't our decision not to. Have growth in those areas. So we, in fact, support growth in the Inland Empire and the Central Valley.

Thank you for that statement. We've been going at this for so long as my fourth term now in the State Assembly, representing the Inland Empire, I see this more than just creating an equal playing field. In order to have equality, in order to have equity, we need to change the game.

And so I do want to note that I do appreciate the Governor's position on the topic, but I do reiterate my hope that our house may choose to go in a different direction in regards to funding facilities improvements at our public institutions of Higher ed. So thank you for your comment. The second question I do want to pose to our CSU Interim Chancellor. This body has supported efforts by CSU staff to get pay increases and for the 92 million in staff compensation.

What does that equate to as far as raises for faculty and staff?

The 92 million represents for all CSU employees an increase of 1.77%.

Thank you.

I was next in line, so I'll just jump in. I think that's okay. All right. I think I want to start with the question of enrollment first, because I heard the CSU system in particular. Thank you to all of you for your presentation. But in particular, identify the number. 6%, I believe was the current most up to date from the CSU system of drop. Let me make sure I get this right. 6% less in enrollment than what was budgeted. Is that correct?

Yes, that is correct.

Great. Thank you for clarifying that. Can I get the other two systems to state where they're at given budgeted figures? Dr. Drake?

Yeah, I'll go first. There are two ways that we measure enrollment. One is in headcount, and the other is an FTE. That's the unit taking behavior.

Sure.

So we're up in headcount. Our headcount is higher this year than last. Our FTE enrollment. I'm looking here. If I go. We're roughly flat from 2019. 2020, we were 176,000. 2020, we were 1776. 20021, 1766. 2022, 1779. So very essentially flat in FTE while the headcount is continuing to go up.

So that's from year to year. What about in the projections in the budget? For current budget?

Yeah. So the projections in the current budget would show that we're flat this year compared to an expected increase. So we're expected to meet our goals next year, but we still have a lag from being. We were expected to go up this year and then up next year. This year, we were pretty flat. So we'll have to have a bigger increase next year than was projected. But it's not done yet.

So to try in my brain to compare apples to apples here, your enrollment growth for current year was what percent.

Essentially flat this year. Is that right?

No, that's what it is. What was it projected in the budget?

I think we're flat to budget. Is that right? Yeah, I think we're about flat to budget this year, but less. I don't want to be wrong. I know we're up in headcount and down in FTE, but a percent or two, I mean, it's not much.

All right. I might have to follow up on that one.

Okay. Sure.

At the community college system.

Even more complex. So we are decentralized system. As you know, we have 73 districts, so they are reporting our data a year behind. And that has always been a challenge. It's why the state invested in the cradle to career data system. Fall 2022 is now stabilized. That means it's flat. Prior to Fall of 2022, we were down more than 16%. So fall 2021 was down 16%. We're now up the 16%, but it means we're flat.

Thank you. I was really interested in the CSU's description of the enrollment plan, and I think in the follow up questions, you provided a little bit more specifics. But does this mean in this enrollment plan that you're projecting - I think I heard you say that you're going to be looking at this more on a campus by campus basis to make sure the resources are going to the campuses that are in higher demand. Are you also then at some point, and when will you be making decisions as to which campuses should expect higher enrollment and therefore also higher amount of resources to support that enrollment growth?

A simple answer is yes to both parts of the question. I'd be glad to elaborate if you would like me to.

Please.

There are seven universities in the CSU, most of them in the north, six of them in the north, one at Cal State Channel Islands, that have a historical low enrollment achieved relative to the enrollment target that they have been funded at and set at. There's different numbers of years with respect to how long they have had that under enrollment.

Starting in 24/25 we will move dollars from those seven universities in smaller amounts, but nevertheless, we will reallocate resources from those seven universities to other universities in the system that have enrollment demand. Exactly the permutations of that move are not specified yet, but we have given the presidents of the seven universities a heads up. They've known since the late summer that we would be doing this with the specifics offered to them in proposals that they saw in December.

So starting in 24/25 in 25/26 and then in 26/27 we will move incremental resources from areas that are essentially overfunded for the number of students that they have to those campuses that can meet the demands that they have for additional enrollment.

Is this plan public now?

The plan is public, yes.

There's a lot of complexities in that, one of which is a big challenge you're taking on, one of which is meet and confer as it relates to staffing issues. How is that going to be?

That will occur on a University by University basis, because each University is responsible, each University leadership team, in consultation with those key constituencies, and each University has a slightly different set of circumstances and places in which they want to approach adjusting their overall budget. So that will all take place on a University by University basis.

Great. Thank you. To our community college system. I asked about this earlier regarding the common course numbering reforms. There wasn't anything specific offered earlier. Is there any additional information? And are you finding that the community college system is able to express its needs and concerns as it relates to this? As I've heard, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that this is one of the challenges for transfer students into particularly our UC and CSU system.

Correct. And I think the LAO provided you surface level response that is very accurate. So the 65 million was actually an investment for California's Community Colleges to begin to make that transformation. Common course numbering is critical because many of our students will take a class in the same district or neighboring district, and so they expect the courses to communicate within districts and across districts, and even more complex when they go to UC and CSU. The common course numbering system is a technology overall.

So imagine getting 116 colleges on the same technology, then retraining an entire workforce, which means going to your local Senate and renegotiating courses, and then while at the same time having the conversations at the statewide level with all of our partners at UC and CSU. So what I can tell you where we are right now.

Even though it had a price tag of three times as the investment that was provided to community colleges, there is a task force, each of the districts will now be receiving funding this June. So there was a task force to coordinate the entire state, coordinate all the academic senates, and begin the conversation locally. The funding goes out. That means we expect our colleges to begin that transformation from one technology across the system. We had more than 68 different technologies being used. What I can tell you is that there's a lot of optimism. It's a part of why the Legislature adopted several bills and why it was provided and discussed for over three years before that investment was made.

Oftentimes with really ambitious programs, the state gets delayed. What is your best assessment at the moment of when this will be implemented?

I think most technology projects take longer. With funding going out in June, you can expect a full report in two years. And that's because once that work begins locally, it will, as you mentioned, we'll have to convene and confer, not me, but our local presidents. You'll have to retrain an entire workforce. But the idea here is we were provided clear deadlines and timelines. Right now we are meeting those deadlines and timelines, but it is a three plus year project.

Okay. Let me end with President Drake. Regarding the UCLA proposal. Is that something that your leadership at your campus is engaged in, supportive of? What can you tell me about the campus itself and this proposal.

Yeah, I'd say broadly in the transfer process or any of the things we do, we're interested in outcomes more than processes. And so the outcome we're interested in is having an effective program to attract and provide opportunity for transfer students at UCLA - at all of our campuses. UCLA happens to be perhaps the most successful of our campuses in this realm. We have a two to one goal of freshmen to transfer admits.

UCLA admits a higher percentage of transfer students than that as we speak, also their transfer - interestingly, if you look at students from underrepresented backgrounds broadly, this is something I'm going to say is counterintuitive, which is that if you look at our system, right, our freshman admission class, the freshman admitted class has more underrepresented minority students as a percentage than our transfer admit class does. And so that's something that we continue to think about. UCLA happens to be the other way around.

Their transfer admit class has more underrepresented students than their freshman admit class. So we wouldn't want to have a change that decreased the ability or the access of underrepresented students to UCLA or to change the balance that they have. So we would look forward to outcomes that were aligned with what I think we and the Administration and you all would seek, and the process going forward would be to work on doing everything we can to keep those good outcomes where they are and to maximize them across the system.

You provide really good - thank you for your answer - information that I had not heard. So I had heard that the issue of diversity, particularly in a transfer class versus a freshman class, which is consistent to what I've heard. I had not heard that UCLA outperforms its transfer students. Do they have a transfer guaranteed program or what kind of transfer students do we see at UCLA?

Yeah. So they have a very holistic admissions program that they use to their transfer application pool, and that's what allows them to achieve, I think, at the level that they are achieving. And I'll say UCLA. As you know this, UCLA receives many years more applications for undergraduate admission than any other University in the United States. So it's extraordinarily, they have an extraordinarily rich pool, and by working with their pool in a holistic fashion, they're able to build a class that reflects the goals that we have, and they do a very good job of that.

Okay. Well, again, consistent to all of my questions, I think, for you and the previous panel. Interested in learning more about the UCLA model in terms of increasing access to underrepresented student populations. And perhaps we should be expanding that to other campuses at UC, particularly at UC, but also maybe at CSU, as opposed to just targeting one school. I think that's something that would be of interest in learning more about what they're doing right.

That perhaps other campuses can do a little bit more of to increase that diversity, particularly in that imbalance of incoming freshmen versus transfer students. So that's the area that I'm interested in. The last thing is on the $200 million program for retention and increase for community college.

I said it earlier, but I'd like to follow up, particularly with chancellor's office, on attracting students in a very unique part of the state that I represent in the border region and looking to our students that perhaps were one time Californians, but now, because of the cost of living, have moved south of the border. I'd like to talk to you more about that. So thank you all for your time, your answers.

Thank you. I know Mr. Fong has some questions, but I just want to go right back to this community college transfer issue, and I'm reading here about the proposal and the response from UCLA. So it is interesting that we have one campus singled out. And so I think that's a distraction from the bigger issue, that it's way too hard for community college transfer students to have a seamless, simple path. And that's what we should be doing. And I know Chancellor - President, excuse me.

You've talked to us about some of the challenges with UC getting enough community college transfer students to meet that two to one formula we have - for every two freshmen, we have one community college transfer student. And just to pull it back, I think I told you I had a very uninspiring academic career as a high schooler. Literally went to adult school, got my adult education equivalent from high school diploma, went to community college, and the light switch turned on.

And I remember that the counselor gave me a little folder and said, you take these classes and you'll become eligible to transfer. And so I followed that around, walked around with that folder for two and a half years, took all the classes. At the end, I took them all to be CSU eligible. I wanted to go to Cal, where one of my friends from high school went, and my dad was a Cal Bear.

But like, no, you need to spend one more year taking these other classes. If you want to go to Cal, you can go to Long Beach State right now. Fine, we'll go to Long Beach State because I want to leave Sacramento. It's still equally as complicated, if not more today. And the community colleges through the CSU system have this simple thing, ADT. So if you're a student, you should just have one thing you do.

You take these classes, and when you're done, you can go to UC or CSU. We make it unnecessarily complicated. So I like this approach the Governor's doing. Granted, maybe it's silly to push one campus and get money back and forth with the UCLA. Understand what the LAO is saying about that. But we should do it for all campuses because we have a problem that's getting smacked in the face. Like we don't have enough people in the pipeline to transfer.

And you're saying all the time we don't have enough people to transfer from community colleges to UC. And so we have a way to simplify it for everybody. Why would we not do that? So I think that's the bigger issue. And we'll get.

Into that more, these proposals. I have some other issues. I'll come back to some other arching issues, but right now, I'll turn to Mr. Fong.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you so much to all of you for your presentations here today. As you heard from Mr. McCarty earlier this morning, very concerned about the housing grants program and the delays potentially there. And so when we look at what Chancellor Gonzalez mentioned, one out of five students being housing insecure and homeless, we know that governors proposed to delay 250 million dollars in housing grants and 900 million dollars in a Revolving Loan Fund from 2023-24 to 24-25.

And this question is, for any of the segments, what is the impact of delaying housing funds?

We have submitted? California State University has submitted several proposals to essentially address or use up the allocation that was set aside for the CSU in the original proposal. So for us, of course, the housing grants have been a welcome omen of change and effort with respect to housing on our University campuses.

Housing is a serious issue for all Californians, and our students certainly are in that category as well. And for us, there are multiple things that are affected by this one. The closer students can live to campus, the more successful they're likely to be. It helps with our retention and graduation rates. Also, since we are a residential community, largely about 37% of our students live on. Well, our students are in class on campus, and then about 37% live in our own housing.

The more students that we have living in our housing, the better we're able to help moderate prices for housing, both on our campus and for other students. It also helps to moderate prices for off campus housing as well. And so we're very much in favor of expanding student housing where we can. We appreciate the support of the Chairman on programs that make it possible for us, through grants or through the Revolving Loan Fund, to build more student housing.

It has a real impact on our campuses and our ability to continue to serve.

Thank you.

Very similar to the colleagues here, for us, housing is about enrollment, persistence, and success. And since we accept everyone that comes to our doors, we are directly tied to addressing the housing crisis in the state. The projects that are ready are ready, meaning the first cycle, we had more applicants than we could give out. And so many of our colleges stand ready to serve the State of California and create affordable housing.

Thank you so much. Great to hear that the systems are ready and so we're ready to really make sure we. I know there's over $1.0 billion of requests when I was reading the memo, so there's a lot of need for additional student housing, and those units are so critical for student success.

And with our community colleges, I know at least in Los Angeles, there's partnerships with LA Room and Board, with Jovenes, and I think some of those partnerships, maybe at the UC and CSU levels, we can also try to scale up and to really look at those innovative partnerships going forward. The next question I have is to Chancellor, Interim Chancellor Gonzales. We know that we've heard concerns about declining enrollment in our community colleges, 20% since 2019, decline.

But I've also heard that a number of campuses are growing now. They've kind of stabilized. So thank you to colleges in California for really working and really being focused on these issues going forward. How are the funds that the state had provided for recruitment and retention for this year's budget being utilized? Have they helped stabilize enrollment?

Yeah, because of the funds. That is what actually has helped us stabilize. Many of our students have commented that the flexibility in meeting their basic needs is what has allowed them to stay enrolled. The campuses that have seen increases, I can tell you, have used really important strategies, everything from making sure students had jobs on campus, to childcare. So when you ask me, what did you do with those funds? That is what we did.

We expanded technology, work study on a campus, emergency housing, short and short term credentials attainment, as well as being able to offer additional hours at all of our campuses. So everything from summer courses to being open after 09:00 p.m.

Thank you for that. And thank you for looking at different models of flexibility of really coursework and making sure that our students are able to access coursework at different times during the day and really making it amenable to their schedules. My next question is for President Drake.

In terms of the recent UC contract agreements, in terms of the planned staffing and enrollment cuts, we know that the UC system has looked at announcing job cuts as they claim necessary to pay for the salaries recently negotiated by the UAW agreement. What is the cost of wage increases and benefits in the recently negotiated contracts with the UAW for each unit, and what are the plans to address these issues?

Yeah, there's no system wide plan to cut jobs. I don't know. We've not announced that. That's not a plan. We look forward to our growth in graduate students and enrollment. So that's not. Yeah, period.

Okay. Thanks for the heads up there. And to Chancellor Koester.

I want to make sure I say something, just want to make sure I'm clear. There may be adjustments in programs over time. I mean, if there are grants that are no grant finishes, et cetera. There are always adjustments in the size of our programs as we move forward over the years, but there's no plan for a cut, per se.

Okay, that's good to know, and thank you for that update. In terms of the regarding $30 million, Chancellor Koester, for the GI 2025 and basic needs, 50 million dollars for strategic resident enrollment growth, can you help us walk us through the specific things that these funds will be used for and what metrics will be used to measure success in this?

The Graduation Initiative is operating by very, very clear metrics for each of the universities and for the system as a whole with respect to graduation rates, retention rates, and we have a renewed, very public focus on eliminating equity gaps among the various groups of students. So the GI 2025 funds are directed toward those specific goals. Each year the system level leadership, as well as working with campus level leadership, has been focusing on different aspects of ways to improve the student success on our universities.

We several years ago established an Advisory Committee that identified five specific areas that we have been working on, including very, very tactical issues related to re-enrolling students who had previously been enrolled but who were no longer enrolled. That's an illustration of what it is we're doing currently. We are beginning to focus, as well as providing additional support to students who come to our universities with less than ideal preparation in math or English.

And so some of those, it's a specific example, some of those resources come to the universities to buttress our efforts, specific efforts there, but all of them are directed at the very public metric with respect to the Graduation Initiative 2025. The basic needs work has taken place over a number of years. The goal is to have robust, accessible, up to date programs at each of the 23 universities.

We actually do have a lot of excellent programs at most of our universities, but the basic needs dollars will probably be distributed more equitably in order to sustain the quality of the programs that already exist.

Thank you so much. Please keep us posted on that progress as well. And thank you to all three segments for everything you're doing on enrollment and look forward to future conversations. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you very much. Mr. McCarty. Chair McCarty, I'd like to direct my questions to President Drake. Good to see you, sir. Thank you very much for representing our great University of California. I want to echo Chairman McCarty's earlier comments.

I wouldn't be doing my job representing the South Bay of Los Angeles County if I didn't emphasize that the number one complaint that I hear from my constituents, as Chair McCarty indicated earlier, is how difficult it is for California kids to get into our University of California campuses.

I know that there is a multi year effort to increase California residents by 17,000 system wide, but I also want to remind this Committee that I believe before the great recession of 2008, starting in 2008, system wide, the University of California, I believe, was around 9% in nonresident student enrollment. What is the current system wide, nonresident student enrollment for undergraduates?

Yeah, I think the percentage is about 18%. Okay. On average, across the group, it ranges, but yes.

Okay. So, of course, from our vantage point and from the vantage point of our constituents, when a student didn't get into their top choice campus, of course, I know that there's all the issues about. We need to think about it system wide, and not just for the highly selective campuses, but that continues to be the first place that my constituents and myself look know. We need to continue to emphasize that the University of California serve, first and foremost, California residents.

And so I certainly want to do whatever I can to support the University of California's ongoing efforts to continue to focus more on California undergraduates than on nonresidents. Do you have any comments on that?

Yeah, the comments are that actually during the period you mentioned, the 15 years, we've dramatically grown the number of California undergraduates, too. So to a much greater degree than would be the case, actually, had we not had the extra resources and support from those other places. So if you look at it purely from the standpoint of being a California resident, then those places continue to grow year after year. They're more slots year after year, and those are continuing to grow forward.

And as you mentioned, we're planning on growing about 17,000 more the rest of this decade. More than 20,000 students total, 23,000 students total, but 17,000 more California slots over the rest of this decade. And that actually is roughly the size that an entire new campus would be. We're not planning a new campus in bricks and mortar, but actually, we're doing our best to open more slots for Californians, and it will be roughly that number. So it's a continued focus of ours.

And we also then appreciate those campuses that we had a goal agreement goal of 18% system wide. Some of our campuses were over that goal. Some were under. For those campuses that were over that goal, we're buying those down to the 18% cap that we'd agreed on. We appreciate very much the Governor and the Legislature supporting that. It's been very successful program now going into its second year, 900 additional California slots per year because of that. And we look forward to marching forward.

Thank you. I want to remind you that the UCLA in particular has embarked on an exciting new venture in my Assembly District by the purchase of the former Marymount California University campus to expand UCLA, if not a new campus, at least a satellite campus. Do you see that strategy as part of your system wide ongoing efforts to expand capacity, especially for California residents?

Absolutely. If we were here a year ago, I would have said that part of our strategy for expanding is to have partnerships with former institutions where we could have instant or rapid expansion of our enrollment and faculty and research capabilities. So that this was an example of exactly what we were talking about. And so we would look for other similar partnerships as well as a marriage of online and in person education.

Other things we can do without bricks and mortar growth on the campus, more programs for students to take courses, for instance, at our UCDC campus, to be here at UC in Sacramento to work on those kinds of partnerships as well. So the goal is to continue to increase the opportunity that students have to take courses to graduate and to get degrees, and in doing so, provide more slots for Californians and others at the University of California. So thank you.

Thank you. I now would like to turn your attention to the topic that Mr. Fong raised regarding the recent contract signed with academic workers. First of all, I want to state that I had the privilege of being a lecturer at UCLA this past fall, for the record, an unpaid lecturer. But I did support the strike and I did honor the picket line.

I felt that it was very important, especially with the academic workers, with the issues being raised, simply to be able to afford to live in the communities that they are working in as a vital, absolutely essential component of what makes our University of California great, whether it's our teaching assistants or academic researchers.

Having said that, I am also very concerned about how the University of California is planning to pay for the additional costs, and I am concerned about its potential impact on the academic quality and the quality of research conducted at our University of California. I know that. Well, could you specifically address what is the estimated total cost of the contract recently signed for academic workers, and how is the University of California planning to pay for those costs?

Well, first, thank you. This was a very large and historic contract that we were pleased to be able to sign toward the end of the year and looking forward very much to moving forward. We understand the pressures that are on everyone who works for the University of California, and particularly on these academic employees.

And that was the reason we went into, as we do with all of our representative employees, we go into our contract negotiations thinking very seriously and sensitively about the needs that they have in their own families and their lives, as we have about 280-290 thousand students, but we have about 230,000 employees. So not exactly, but roughly equal size there. And so supporting our staff and those who work for us broadly is a critical part of our mission.

I have five things that have been guiding points for me over the last 30 years of University leadership. Actually, I'll tell you what they are. One is education is critical to us. The second is research is critical to us. Third is patient care is critical to us. Those things are very, very important. Fourth, we have to work in a fiscally responsible way. We have to work within our budget. And five, we have to support our workforce.

And so all of our programs, as they go forward, have those five components. What to do for education? What for research? What for patient care? Is it fiscally responsible? Does it support our workforce? So we care about those things. When we have a new contract, that's a large contract, we then have to implement that, and that requires adjustments, and it is going to require active work. In all of our campuses, these particular working circumstances, there are thousands of different relationships.

Here it says you were teaching a class. That was one set of relationships. We have individual employees working in individual labs. We have some faculty Members who have one or two employees working with them. Others have many more. Each of those, this is made up of the combination of all of those things together. And when there's a change, we have to adjust and make sure that things are aligned perfectly. So the exact answer to each of those is going to be different depending on the circumstances.

Let me just say, for many years, a faculty Member, I had grants. You work on a grant for a while, that's great. You have that grant funded, then you complete that work, you apply for, get funded for something different. Those things are adjusting day in, day out. Also, we teach different courses. I was looking at the course catalog for UC Berkeley, and there was different majors at Berkeley.

There are 160-180 majors at Berkeley, and I was looking at one that's called Geospatial Information Science and Technology as a major. And I won't do this to you, but if I asked you, what does that mean? I will say that it's a challenge. There are many new courses and directions of study that we undertake, and so things adjust as the curriculum evolves moving forward.

So the paying for this will then mean adjusting as the University continues to evolve forward and there'll be a variety of different solutions, but again, everyone is working actively on those, even today.

President Drake, I certainly appreciate your explaining the complexities, but surely the University of California border regions must have some dollar figure that they're planning for in terms of the total cost of the contract. What would that be?

Yeah, so the dollar figure, the total cost of the contract. Let me make sure I can get it correctly. If I'm going to do this from. Well, let me say I could do it from memory, but better for me to give you the actual numbers. Let's do that after the time. Okay. The guesstimate is about.

Oh gosh, it's about $60 million this year, about 150-200 additional next year, and a similar amount the year after that for about 325 to 350 would be the guesstimate increment increase for this group of workers. But I'll say that's a guesstimate and that there's flexibility in there that makes those numbers ballpark figures as unequal as the thousands of different relationships I mentioned. Okay, that's fair enough. I want to answer you, but I don't want to say anything that's just specifically and incorrect.

Thank you, sir. So those are significant costs. How is the University of California planning to pay for those costs?

Yes, so significant costs on a very large. This is 48,000 employees. So this is on a budget of two and a half billion dollars, plus minus. So the increment is large, but it's on a very large base. And as I said again, those are multiple different relationships on different campuses with different down to the individual faculty members. So the adjustments that will take place will be based on the circumstances in each of those relationships.

Have there been any directives or guidelines to Chancellors of our UC campuses as to how to plan for these increased costs?

No directives have been issued on this. No.

I wanted to bring to your attention, or at least you may be aware of this. I have a copy of an email here that went to the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and it discusses plans that at least this campus appear to be taking to plan for these increased costs.

And the sentence that I found most concerning was that in the email it indicates or suggests to the faculty members to please quote, please consider reducing enrollment of new PhD students by as much as 20% so that we can take the 2023-2024 academic year to determine new models for our education and research.

A 20% decrease in PhD students seems to be a significant setback for not only our University of California as the premier research institution in our state, if not in the country or in the world. So I'm very concerned that there appears to be directives or guidelines to cut back as many as one out of five PhD students studying at the University of California Davis campus. And of course that translates into less teaching assistance for undergraduate students.

It translates into less researchers for faculty Members to be able to support their research. And I know that this has been part of a nationwide debate about the outdated model of our universities in terms of its relying on academic workers as kind of like indentured servants, where they have the mixed role of being graduate students while at the same time being essential workers in our University system to provide not only the instruction, instructional support, but also the research.

Could you comment on what if we're looking at one out of five PhD students being cut back? What does that mean for the future of the University of California?

Yeah, so first, I don't know who that email came from or who it went to. If you asked me what things might have been considered by the 11,000 faculty Members we have, I mean, people can consider a lot of things, but that's now a directive that came from me, from my office. First, so we wouldn't do such a thing. Second, I don't know what solution. Even in the email it said consider.

So in the range of things that actually occur, the difference between what is considered, which would be large and what actually occurs, that's going to be something that's often different than what is considered, of course. And so that, I think will be more the reality that we see. Very much so. Third, I'd use a different word than indentured servant, just different phrase.

I appreciate the challenge that my son is a new assistant Professor, and so I watched him go through graduate school just now at one of our campuses. My daughter-in-law is in the same position, different campus, but same thing, and certainly understood the funding challenges they had. The new contract will be among the most generous in the country, certainly for a public research institution. There's never been a contract this supportive and this generous that has existed before.

And it was done with the recognition that we need to do our best to be able to support our students as they're getting this very valuable training and outcome at the end of the term, which is being trained to go out and be leaders of tomorrow. So that is the goal. We work with our students. We want them to be successful.

We recruit and attract students to be the very best students we can have, and we have among the leading graduate programs, honestly, in the world because of that. So supporting that part of our enterprise is critically important to our success, and we are working every day to make these programs even more successful.

Finally, I'd just like to wrap up my comments. It's my understanding that the University of California is probably ahead of the rest of the nation in terms of this contract entered into with the academic workers. I know that California can often be proud of being progressive in supporting things like worker rights, but of course, I'm sure you're thinking, and the rest of the University is thinking, well, Legislature, you supported the strike. Now it's time for you to pay for it. But yeah, I just wanted to.

My closing comment is that I know that being the first in the country may place the University of California at a competitive disadvantage in terms of being able to not only attract PhD students, especially if we're considering cutting back on the number of graduate students, although I know that there is also the ongoing commitment to increase the number of graduate students, but also its impact on attracting faculty if they can't have the research support from their graduate students, that I'm concerned that it's going to impact the University's ability to be able to attract top faculty talent.

And so, yeah, I wanted to see if you had any comments on that.

Just to agree with her. You have taught at our campuses, as I do, and you know there's a balance in all these things. We want to be the very best we can be, and we are honestly proud and pleased and flattered at the way we are perceived by the world, by the students who choose to come and be educated with us. Our faculty is unrivaled worldwide for the commitment and the productivity and the impact they make on society.

And that's what the University of California stands for. That's our daily work. All of these things are in balance. To be the best, you have to put the best effort in. The costs of those things are real. The costs of living in California are real, and we try to balance all of those things. So when I gave you my five principles from 1990, I mean the tried and true, we want to be the best educational system we can possibly be.

High graduation rates, inclusion, diversity, support, all of those things. Our research really is second to none. And you know that we are among the world's leading researchers in so many areas, and that's our daily commitment is to continue to push that forward. Our patient care again, one of our academic centers was rated number one in the world recently for being an academic medical center, we continue to want to do that for all those things that are important.

And then we want to take care of our employees and our workers and make sure this is an outstanding place to have a career. I've had a career at the University, and it's been great. I have staff Members and colleagues who've been working with me for decades, as Jolene was mentioning earlier. And then finally, we have to do this within a fiscal envelope that makes sense, that works. The bottom line has to balance.

And so we work on all of these things together and pushing ourselves forward to be at and stay at the front of the highest quality educational system that we can possibly be. And we truly appreciate your commitment and support to those things. It makes all the difference.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Okay, thank you. I just have maybe a follow up question for this on the contract, and thank you for the questions. Just a big picture on the budget. I know when this was happening, some were saying, oh, can we put a little bit more in the budget to take care of this? And same with the CSU as well. And the answer is no.

We funded 5% increase, which is a lot we're going to hear from childcare people in three weeks who got a 0% increase, and a bunch of healthcare programs who got zero. So it's a lift to get to the 5%. And frankly, if the budget situation looks like Department of Finance is alluding to, the 5% in May, could be 4% or 3%, so it could go the opposite direction.

But the big picture is that, yeah, we assume that the University signed this contract knowing how much money they have. And it's not insignificant what the state is providing. So as the agenda shows that the General Fund piece for the UC is now about 4.3 billion as of last year's budget, which is a billion more than just two years ago. Right? Not to mention about a billion that we put in through our financial aid systems for the UC.

So that's roughly five and a half billion in General Fund. Not to mention the student fee revenue you get from your students, from our families across California, not to mention the 20 plus billion in federal research and medical money that you get. So a lot of these folks work in the entirety of the whole UC system. So it's a multibillion dollar University, 30 billion. It's enormous, more than many state budgets across the nation.

And we assume that you expect that you sign this contract and have the resources to cover it and not to come back and ask for any more. So just want to be clear. And same with the CSU issue as well. So other overarching questions, President, it was music to my ears to hear you talk about debt free college. I know Mr. Ting and I have been on this for a number of years.

Mr. Medina, now on vacation, home in Riverside I 'm sure is watching, knowing this Cal Grant Reform makes such a difference. And the end goal is to have college debt free in California for our most qualified and deserving students. And with that, you mentioned that by 2030, that is the goal. So is that assuming that we go all the way and Fund these middle class scholarships to more than we've already done to expand our financial aid system, or is that within your existing UC resources?

Well, it's a debt free pathway to education is a goal for us, period. And we would do this within the complex financial realities of the state and the world. So the better, the more support we have from the Legislature, the sooner we can get there.

Let me ask you again in plain English. So the budget, my question will be plain English. So we did this massive lift on Cal Grant Middle Class Scholarship Reform the past two years. As the DOF said and the Lao, there's a little trigger. So we need to make sure we have proper revenue to pay for that of which is expanding the number of people who get the Cal grant and giving additional money to pay for non tuition costs.

And so we're paying by the money we have in there now is roughly, I think we talked about, pays for about a quarter of the cost of total cost of attendance. So we estimate to cover the full amount, we'd have to increase our financial aid budget here north of 2 billion, which is a goal we have. So is your goal for debt free for 2030, assuming that we do this additional 2 billion, or are you talking about within your existing UC parameters?

Yeah, I'll say with our projections. I'll try to be plain English in my answer as well. These are projections. So if you continue to move forward, then our assurance that we can get there is higher than if not. It's our goal no matter what, to get there. But Pell Grant changes matter. Honestly, the cost of our doing business in other parts of our enterprise matter. All of those things, as I mentioned, those are all within the same financial envelope.

So this is a goal within that financial envelope. And we are seeking 2030. To be honest, I was hoping we would get there before 2030.

Excellent. Yes. So are we.

Yeah. So I would just say that we would love to partner. The better, the more you can help the faster we can get there, and we'll do our best as well.

Yeah. And thank you for keep talking about this. I know the Governor has talked about this as well in his budget unveiling. And also when he was sworn in again as a new Governor, he talked about this goal of having debt free college. Yeah, a lot of talk across the nation about free college, but maybe we can't afford that. And is it use, using our scarce dollars to subsidize my kid for your college or Mr. Muratsuchi or Mr. Martin? I don't know.

It'd be nice, but probably not worth Mr. Alvarez, all of our scarce resources. So I think the debt free is the appropriate approach on the student housing issue. Thank you for helping lead and partner on this idea. I just want to note that this idea was literally hatched at a conversation we had with some chancellors three or four years ago, led by our UC San Diego Chancellor Khosla.

And we came up with this notion that if California stepped in, leaned in a little bit with some resources, like a Revolving Loan Fund, we could really unleash the construction of a massive amount of beds for students and really make a difference in affordability, accessibility, and the housing crisis across California. So we're doing that and we're pushing back out of the gate, and we don't want to do this pause. And I know the Governor is not proposing it because they think it's a bad idea.

They're just looking at the spreadsheet. And maybe we have some other ideas. But what would be lost if we did the pause? What would be delayed? Denied?

Yes. We have a plan to add about 25,000 new beds between now and 2025. And as you've heard from others, there are shovel ready projects ready to move forward, and we would continue to move forward with projects. They're just delayed as we're not able to have funding able to start them. So our goals remain the same and our efforts to get there as quickly as we can remain the same. Student housing is critically important for all the reasons that you know so well.

And your support in helping us build as much housing as we can in the most community supporting, environmentally sensitive way that we can is, I think, in the interests of all Californians. So we appreciate that support.

Thank you. We will be pushing that forward. And then for this cross cutting issue with the community colleges, we hope that there's something that can be achieved for this ADT because the solution that we're going to push forward, maybe you won't like. So I know Mr. Berman had this Bill which has this work group among the faculty, but we've been dragging our feet for two decades. So, you know, we're counting on this to be done.

The remedy here may not be as appealing to you all, so just take note of that. And then I know we lost our interim chancellor. So we have our interim interim chancellor like it was a soccer match. So we had a little warning up and we had a replacement in the middle of the match here. So welcome up here, Mr. O'Brien.

One of the issues that Daisy talked about in her presentation is Mr. Ting was talking about the loss of 300,000 students, and that's like two UC systems almost. That's a lot. And yes, some are going to the workforce when there's record low unemployment and fast food sometimes pays north of $20 an hour. Maybe that's more attractive than going to community college. Granted, your end career path may not be the same, but some of your students, as the survey said, they're choosing other things, too, other paths.

Maybe sometimes for profit colleges are more attractive. Maybe they're way more expensive and have negative impacts on your pocketbooked and your debt end of the day. But they're easier. They're virtual combination. They're compacted. They're evenings, more evenings and weekends. And so I know that she talked about we can't be not business as usual. Are we really doing things differently? Because if we're not, people are going to keep walking with their feet and look for alternative options.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Members. As you noted, my name is David O'Brien, Vice Chancellor for Government Relations for the California Community Colleges. Interim Chancellor Gonzalez did have to catch a flight. I believe it's southwest. So as everybody here knows, can't be too careful with them these days.

In response to your question, yes, we can say definitively that our colleges are starting to innovate and look to new ways of doing business, whether it's on doing a better job marketing locally to students to make sure that they understand the benefits of community college, making sure that they understand that many of these programs, thanks to investments the Legislature has made, are tuition free.

We've done tours of community colleges where students have told us learning that this program was guaranteed to be tuition free for me is what got me to sign up. Another area that we anticipate will have a major impact is on what's called the Zero Textbook Cost, or I think we've now rebranded it as Burden Free Instructional Materials, but basically ensuring that we can get instructional materials like textbooks and other things into students hands as quickly as possible with as little burden or cost as possible.

You mentioned the for profit sector, Mr. Chair. Colleague of mine attended an all online for profit several years ago for a master's degree, where a week before courses started, they mailed her an Ipad with all of her textbooks preloaded for the semester onto that Ipad. Right. You're correct that it's at a much higher cost and often leaves students with crippling levels of debt and poor quality education.

But one thing that sector does do is sort of market intensively to students that we'll meet you where you're at, we'll have flexible course scheduling, we'll have shorter terms, those sorts of things. So what I think we'd like to do in the California community colleges is pair that flexibility and that intensive, direct support to students with the higher quality education and much, much lower costs that we provide.

So that's what the needle we're trying to thread right now, thanks to the significant investments the Legislature has made.

Follow up on that. What's required to do that? I know those are a bunch of nice words out there, but what needs to happen to this change for alternatives for community college students?

Certainly, as Dr. Gonzalez noted, it's a very complex system. 73 districts means, I believe more than 73 different faculty unions are part of that process of negotiating with the local senates around things like instructional materials. Right. When the Legislature made the investment in zero textbook costs, one of the conversations we had at that time was, this is very significant.

It's not as simple as saying to every instructor in the state, hey, if there is a free version of the sort of main textbook you teach for your course, you are here for required to use that free version of that textbook. If only it were that simple, right? Those things have to be negotiated, have to be discussed at the local level, bargained and so forth. So in response to your question, what would it take?

Many, many years have continued negotiations at the local level, pressure and oversight from the Legislature. I will say we welcome the continued, as you heard from Dr. Gonzalez, we welcome the continued focus on accountability and outcomes from our partners in the Legislature. Continued partnership with the four year segments, which has been so phenomenal to date.

And you know, again, continuing to have these conversations and to recognize what parts of the experience that maybe other sectors are doing that appeal to students that we can replicate. But again, with the higher quality education and lower costs that we provide, not wanting to try and become the new University of Phoenix, certainly by any stretch of the imagination, but support students in a way that they feel that they can and should choose our option over some of those others.

Well, just a warning for all of us. If we don't, they're going to make the choices for us and we'll face more decline. And I know for community college isn't always the worst thing for you all because we have a set. You get 11% of the Prop 98 budget and you serve fewer students, you still get the money. So you get more money for fewer students. We don't want that. And your individual campuses all talk about their impact.

So something that we need to be mindful of, and I don't know if we have a good solution yet. And so we need to think about what tools we need to put on the table to make this happen. And the same thing for our community colleges. I mean, I'm sorry, our CSU as well, that students are making other choices and finding alternative means. So do you feel that this drop in enrollment is something just for this time period?

We're going to be able to turn it around? Because it's somewhat perplexing to us that both four year institutions, UC and CSU grant, are different. But like very stark realities as far as enrollment last two years.

We're clearly approaching the enrollment situation as potentially a longer term issue, but taking steps now to immediately change the way we do a variety of aspects of the enrollment and retention aspects, because for us, this is our mission. We are committed to staunching that enrollment loss over a period of time and meeting the commitments that we have made in the compact.

Good morning. My name is Jonathan Chen, and I have been a lecturer in Sacramento State's Philosophy Department for 10 years. I have and always will believe that public education can transform the lives of our students and this very community. We hope the CSU trustees share the same vision. We also hope they prioritize students, faculty, and staff.

But it is challenging to see them hand out considerable raises and expensive perks to the University presidents instead. Many of these 7% to 29% raises come just prior to the retirement of several presidents or their unseemly resignations. That money is wasted on very few wealthy individuals. And worse, these payouts come at a time when 41% of our students at CSU struggle with food insecurity. As faculty, our workload exceeds our capacity as we become responsible for more and more students in the classroom.

Students cannot grow if their tribulations are boundless, and faculty cannot teach if their burdens are unending. I'm not asking you to give us what we don't deserve. But if money is to be allocated to the CSU, you must ensure that it is meaningful to our students and not those who need it the least.

I promise you, given the chance, teachers will ensure that the generations of students to come won't just function well in society, but they'll learn to live as purposeful beings that live up to what we knew they could all along. Thank you.

Good morning, Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Rafael Jaime. I'm a graduate student worker at UCLA, and I'm also the President of UAW 2865, which is the union that represents 36,000 teaching assistants, graduate student researchers, tutors, and readers at the University of California system. Less than two months ago, 48,000 of UAW workers reached a historic agreement with the University of California that ensures that UC is a more accessible and equitable institution for workers of diverse backgrounds. And we're thankful for the Assembly who supported our strike.

I applaud the vision for the University of California that President Drake presented this morning because we share the same vision for a more accessible and equitable University. And we too, believe that UC must strive to serve the people of California by making academic excellence accessible to more Californians. The University's actions over the last month, however, belie the UC's commitment to this vision.

Since reaching an agreement with UC that gives workers more dignified wages, the University has responded with cost-cutting measures that will dramatically hurt the quality of education and research at the University of California. These cost cutting measures include eliminating entire discussion and lab sections, increasing class sizes, shrinking research groups, and replacing highly qualified graduate student instructors with unpaid undergraduate learning assistants. Overall, campuses have proposed cutting the academic workforce.

Time, sir. So just to note that, thank you for your comments. I appreciate them. So the first two were basically a minute and a half to two minutes. So everybody else in line, if you can recalibrate your comments to 60 seconds or less. Less is more. 60 seconds or less. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Elias Bunting. I'm a PhD student from the Department of Plant Pathology at UC Davis. Last year, Gary May, the Chancellor of UC Davis, said that the UC has the highest number of enrolled California resident undergraduates in the UC system, that the Davis's revenue went up from $3.4 billion to $6.2 billion, and that the restoration of the 2020-2021 state budget had stabilized their core funds for the next several years.

Last week, campus faculty received an email from the provost asking departments, the thing that you guys talked about, to cut enrollment by 20%. My department personally is planning on dropping that number of new grad students from the typical eight or nine to two to four. This is going to put a great strain on my ability to teach the large undergraduate class that we have at UC Davis.

So we know that there's more undergrads than ever, a stable budget, and yet there's fewer spots for grad students, creating the problems that you guys are talking about. So I did want to reiterate, I am asking for you guys to find a more equitable way to balance the budget. Thank you

Good morning, Chair McCarty and Committee Members. Manny Rodriguez here on behalf of the Institute for College Access and Success, more commonly known as TICAS. First, I'd like to thank you all for the historic investments you all have made over the last two budgets around affordability, the community college entitlement expansion, Cal Grant reform in 2024, very, very, very much needed. Want to address a comment made by the LAO on prioritizing certain investments around affordability. TICAS respectfully recommends that we really prioritize Cal Grant reform.

When you look at that reform moving forward, the way it prioritizes our lowest income students, highest-need students, community college students. It grows their award with CPI and removes final access barriers. Those are critically needed to really make sure that we are equitably prioritizing affordability in California. Thank you.

Hi there. My name is Danielle Dellapasqua. I'm a teaching assistant at UC Davis and a fourth year. I teach a class of over 2000 undergraduates with about 60 TA sections. Each TA teaches about two sections of 25 students. In a class this large, it's impossible for professors to get to have one-on-one time with each student. TA lab sections are where individual support and learning happens and where I make close connections with my students.

Lab and discussion sections are a place that undergrads can plug into the field. For example, a student of mine now works with me on my research projects. President Drake says that enrollments will increase, but last week, Provost Mary Croughan at UC Davis sent all faculty a letter asking that they consider cutting PhD enrollment by 20% to fund salary increases. Officially, my department has said that it's going to cut enrollment. This means fewer TAs, with increasing undergraduate enrollment. Will students have to suffer from bigger class sizes, which means less support per student? And what is the plan for supporting these larger class sizes with fewer TAs? Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Tova Valentine. I'm a third year undergraduate and tutor at UC Davis. First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for being here, considering our President left and is not listening to our comments. So, my first quarter after we returned from lockdown, I took a very difficult biology class. I struggled to follow in lecture and it reflected in my failing midterm score. My TA was the reason I turned my grade around and the reason I actually understood the material.

I have taken classes with over 700 students in them, a number that will surely grow with the UC's plans to increase undergrad enrollment and decrease graduate enrollment. We would not survive without our TAs. They are the ones who help us directly, who inspire us, who give us a glimpse at a future in higher education. Davis has become a second home to me, and I will forever cherish the community I've built here.

But when I'm looking for a grad program, why would I ever choose a University that considers the people I look up to disposable? If the UC system wants a future in higher education, if they want undergrads like me to take them seriously, grad students have to be a priority in our budget. Thank you.

Chair McCarty and Members of the Committee. Neal Sweeney, President of UAW Local 5810. We represent about 12,000 postdocs and academic researchers. We are the two of the groups that settled contracts at the end of last year. Thanks for your comments to questions to President Drake. We very much agree. We think the money's there. There's the record state funding. There's $5 billion in federal research funding. There's the compact money. There's tuition increases and the planned increase this year.

Our members do research that benefits California: climate change research, lithium battery research, biomedicine. And the letter that was read is only one of written statements from a number of campuses along the same lines. So we appreciate the Committee's focus on our workforce and make sure that UC has strong teaching and research mission. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Tania. I'm an international PhD student worker in UC Berkeley's Architecture Department in the History, Theory and Society Program. I came to Berkeley because of this program's rich history and unique interdisciplinary research. Unfortunately, this program and the quality of education, the Architecture Department have been negatively impacted by budget cuts over the past 20 years, reducing faculty members to half, and cutting two-thirds of PhD enrollments.

Recently, faculty members were told that the department budget will not cover the new salaries secured by our contracts, and they have to figure out how to do the same work, or potentially more, with fewer TAs and readers per class. Meanwhile, newer, privately funded programs are being prioritized. Recently, the Dean requested we vacate the room that has been the home of Architecture grad students for over 30 years in order to accommodate the new needs of the Real Estate Development Program.

We cannot let market interest and external donors decide the future of education at UC at the expense of academically vital research and the workers who perform it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Chair and Members. My name is Catherine Hutchinson, and I'm the President of California State University Employees Union. We represent nearly 16,000 non-faculty staff at the CSU. We would like to thank the Assembly and the Legislator for their leadership and support in addressing the systematic wage issues that CSU non-faculty staff have been facing for more than three decades. As many of you may remember, the Legislature funded a study in 2021 to examine the wage structure for non faculty staff at the CSU.

The independent consultant, Mercer, determined that CSU staff salaries are, on average, 12% behind the market median, even though we received a 7% GSI last year, that's still not enough. We're still 12% below market. So we continue to seek implementation of salary steps to help with our compensation. I would like to share with you that CSUEU and CSU are at the bargaining table, and both entities have put forth proposals that include steps.

We are still reviewing the CSU proposal, and there are a lot of outstanding questions, but it's positive that we both have proposals centered around steps now, even if they're miles apart. We want to work with the Subcommitee to ensure there's a robust review of CSU spending proposals to increase transparency and ensure that each dollar appropriated by the Legislature supports CSU's student and employee success.

We look forward to working with the CSU and Legislature to ensure that students, faculty and staff and the CSU are able to thrive. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Christopher Rooney. I'm a metal worker at Cal State University Northridge and a member of Teamsters 2010, on their bargaining team with the CSU. We're grateful for the committing to major multi-year investments of state funding into the CSU, but for workers like us, the compact is not enough. Decades of underinvestment and support staff salaries by the CSU has left thousands of workers struggling to make ends meet. Salaries for teams for skilled trades workers at the CSU are, on average, 18% lower than comparable employers in Northern and Southern California, and we have no step program in any way to get to the top of our salary range. I'm a 32 year employee with no disciplinary actions, never a bad review, and I'm at the bottom of my salary range. After 32 years, I could hire somebody tomorrow and they'd make as much, if not more, than me.

After 32 years of dedicated service. The CSU is a world-class provider of public education. We need the funding to ensure that it can provide high quality careers and living wages for its employees, too. Thank you.

Morning, everyone. My name is Spencer Owen, and I'm a plumber at CSUN. I've been a plumber for seven years, as well as a proud Teamster from Local 2010. Special thanks to Interim Chancellor Jolene Koester for speaking on behalf of the CSU system in Cal State Northridge.

We're here today because the lack of investment and support of staff who keep the CSU running has reached crisis. The average length of service for CSU team service, the skilled trades workers who keep the lights on and the water running at 22 campuses, is 10 and a half years. But 97% of us who have more than 10 years of service at the CSU are below maximum of our salary range.

Our wages are stagnant for a decade, and as new hires come making the same as us or more. My personal story includes moving here from Nebraska 10 years ago in hopes of a change, a better life and amazing job. I was able to find an employment at CSUN through meeting a current employee whose son was taking RCIA classes with me to become Catholic. Leo said, "We need a guy like you. Go online and apply." Seven years has passed very quickly.

I am very lucky to have a job at CSUN, especially during the pandemic. We stayed working while others stayed home, but now it's time to pay us what we deserve. We were there when others could not. We need the steps to move us through the top of our pay scale so we can retire with dignity. I do not want to move out of the State of California when I retire because I can no longer afford to live in our beautiful state.

Our workers deserve more than being told that there is no money left in the budget for us. The CSU is a world class provider of public education. We need the funding to ensure that it can provide high quality careers and living wages. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Members, I'm a little short, so I'm going to have to hold the mic. My name is Vicky McLeod and I'm the Chair of the Statewide Legislative Committee for the CSU Employees Union. I am a staff member at Cal State Fullerton and an employee in the CSU for over 35 years, and incredibly proud of the work I and other CSU Employees Union members do to serve our students and institutions.

I would like to echo President Hutchinson's comments regarding the importance of transparency in the CSU's proposed budget and the implementation of salary steps. We want to make sure every dollar given to the CSU goes towards student and employee success. Funding a fair and equitable salary system for non-faculty staff is critically important as the CSU continues to grow. The CSU's success relies upon the talents and work of its employees, but attracting and retaining staff are extremely difficult.

Employees at the CSU are faced with stagnant wages while the same jobs elsewhere offer competitive wages. We believe that robust oversight of the CSU's proposed expenditures will not only provide clarity on a path forward for salary step implementation, but will also pave the way to success for CSU students and the dedicated faculty and staff who serve them. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair McCarty and fellow Committee Members. My name is Nicole Trujillo Rice. On behalf of the California State Building Construction Trades Council, we oppose any cuts or reduction or pauses to funding capital outlay projects for student housing and facility expansion. Furthermore, we believe that these projects should use skilled and trained workforce. The California State Building Construction Trades Council represents 500,000 men, women, and nonbinary individuals in the California construction industry. 70,000 of these are enrolled in our state-of-the-art apprenticeship programs.

Because of the model of apprenticeship programs--earn-while-you-learn and on the job training--these job sites are higher educational classrooms for California construction apprentices. We believe that any building of housing or facilities for students and faculty should be sustainable and built to the highest of standards. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Andrew Martinez, Community College League of California. First of all, we want to thank the Administration for the investments they have made on our colleges, including the cost of living adjustment. We appreciate that it's consistent with what K-12 has received, and so we're very, very appreciative of that. However, we also want to thank the Administration for the investments in enrollment.

We are a little concerned that it's at the cost of deferred maintenance, so we would encourage that there be as much flexibility as possible to address deferred maintenance and enrollment as possible for our colleges. And then finally, we also want to encourage that you continue to invest in housing as well, because it is an important part of supporting our students. And then finally, we are appreciative that Cal Grant reform will continue to be addressed as moving forward as we go forward into next year.

Hello. My name is Sidrah Marotti. I am a first-year Master of City Planning student at Berkeley. President Drake, who we all miss very dearly right now, stated in his opening statement that he is so proud that we have so many basic needs centers on campus. We'd like to invite all of you to consider why we need so many basic needs centers. It's because we are all in poverty and these job cuts that are proposed are going to make things so much worse.

I chose to come to the University of California at Berkeley because of, first, the caliber of education, and second, because I thought I could afford it. On the note of the caliber of education, as we see our academic teams, as we see our teaching teams dwindle, we are also seeing the quality of our education dwindle. We are going to receive less feedback as graduate students, and for undergrads it's even worse. And then the note on affordability.

This is frankly the larger concern for me as it is for most of my peers. I anticipated a certain amount of jobs to be available for me to apply to when I decided to start this program. Myself and many other people who are already enrolled in programs will not be able to afford these programs if these job cuts go on as anticipated. President Drake earlier stated that he is anticipating 42,000 new undergraduates in the coming few years.

If that undergraduate amount increases as jobs decrease, I can assure you there's going to be a hell of a lot of use of those basic needs centers.

Good afternoon. My name is Andrea Terry and I am an Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Sacramento State and a proud CFA Member. We at CFA believe that the state budget allocation should be more explicit regarding how the CSU resources are used, and we urge you to direct the CSU to devote any increases or a significant proportion of its existing allocation to the costs of classroom and student success. Lower student to teacher ratios would most effectively help meet the graduation initiative and student success issues that were talked about today. There's much talk about retaining students and being able to attract new students.

Students aren't going to want to come if we are continuing to increase the course caps and don't have the resources to support those students as faculty members. For example, in the midst of the pandemic last year, in addition to my regular course load, I taught a 30 person writing intensive graduate seminar. That is triple what the amount of graduate students in a class should be. Student learning conditions are faculty working conditions, and we can't support student success with increasing class sizes.

We can't help our students when we're overwhelmed and we don't have the resources for our students' mental health issues. State funding should go directly to our students, not to more Administration. Please help us to help our students by directing the CSU's budget to full-time faculty and full-time mental health counselors. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Eric Hayes. I'm here on behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, which represents the tenure and tenure track faculty at the University of California. President Drake told Assemblymember Fong that UC has made no announcements of cuts to pay for the costs of these new contracts. That's because the office of the President is allowing responsibility for solving this fiscal problem to fall on campuses.

And in the letter from Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Mary Croughan that Assemblymember Muratsuchi quoted, there's another line that says, "the principal investigator in the college, school and or unit will be responsible for identifying sufficient funding or making other adjustments." So the campuses are putting this on the backs of the faculty. The reality is this will mean fewer TAs and fewer RAs, less teaching and less research. This will mean less access to instructors for undergraduate students.

The student-to-faculty ratio has been getting worse at UC for years, 12% worse over 15 years for all categories of faculty, 17% worse when considering only tenured and tenure track faculty. This reduces the course offerings, the classes students can take, which may help explain why student headcount is up, but FTE is stuck. For the externally funded research assistant positions, campuses are asking faculty to negotiate higher levels of funding in future contracts. For the most part, these positions are state funded positions.

I consider my presence here following through on UC administrative direction to negotiate higher levels of funding in future contracts. California public higher education is in 47th place in the nation in terms of funding per student. Only Nevada, North Carolina and Florida fund their colleges and universities worse.

Good afternoon, I'm Uncas Kenning. You have heard from UAW Members in the UC system. UAW also represents 10,000 academic student workers in the CSU system who work as teaching associates, graduate assistants and instructional student assistants in UAW Local 4123, and we will be negotiating a fair successor agreement with CSU management this summer to bring the academic student worker wages, benefits and working conditions up to the level of 2023.

Academic student workers know from experience that staff recruitment and retention at CSU is in a crisis and a significant number of the issues in our jobs, from missing paychecks to a chaotic start of employment at a tutoring center, they have to do with staff turnover or simply vacant positions.

You have already heard right now as well from our colleagues who are staff at the CSU and members of CSUEU and the Teamsters and CFA, and we would like to echo their message as well, to fund fair wages and salary progression for all of us at the CSU. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Stratton Georgoulis and I'm a PhD candidate in Plant Pathology at UC Davis and a proud member of UAW 2865. I have spent most of my time in graduate school on a graduate student researcher appointment where the principal investigator of my lab pays my salary and tuition from grants that she has earned. This means I can focus all of my time on research instead of also having to take on TA responsibilities.

Earlier last year, my principal investigator told me that I would not have to TA this academic year because she had enough funding to support me as a student researcher. However, when I returned to work this year after our historic strike, she told me that the financial situation in my lab had changed and that I would need to find a TA position.

This makes sense in light of a letter sent to UC Davis faculty from Provost Mary Croughan, asking that principal investigators and departments find at least $5,000 to pay for the increased costs of each researcher before central funding would be made available from the UC Davis campus. Budgets for individual labs and departments are tight.

The UC Office of the President's decision to not provide financial support for the increased costs of academic researchers will result in lower graduate student enrollments if labs and departments are forced to foot the bill, despite President Drake and the UC's promise to increase graduate student enrollment in the coming years. The UC Office of the President must make central funding available to support the increased cost of academic researchers in order to preserve the UC as a world class institution in scientific research. Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Steven Filling. I'm a Professor of Accounting at Stanislaus State and Political Action Chair for the California Faculty Association. CFA thanks this Committee for its advocacy for the CSU. Governor Newsom's January proposal honors his compact agreement with the CSU. Modest increases, though, just don't address the real issues in the CSU. The legacy of underfunding at the CSU requires increased investment to offset accelerating economic inequities for faculty, staff and students.

We ask this Committee to acknowledge those very real issues and allocate additional funding above the compact. Our state budget must reflect the value of the CSU in public higher education, to our state's economic prosperity and to our state's ability to navigate tough budget years. Assemblymembers, the time to invest in students and workers is now. Thank you.

Kimberly Rosenberger with SEIU. I apologize to Assemblymember Muratsuchi for overhyping my comments. I'm merely going to be aligning them with CFA and CSUEU, especially in the need for making sure that the workforce, our staff, and our faculty are treated with respect and are compensated appropriately, especially as we continue to expand our CSU population. We will bring the Legislature along as we continue conversations with the CSU and would also echo the need for sunshine in the CSU budget. Thank you.

Good morning, Chair McCarty and Assemblymembers. I apologize for being underdressed, but I can't afford better. My name is Michael Lee-Chang and I'm a Pell Grant first year undergrad Political Science student at Sac State from Redondo Beach. And to graduate in four years, I'm balancing, or at least trying to, five classes, three jobs, extracurriculars, relationships, sleep, and, of course, three meals a day. I've been spread so thin that I lost 10 pounds just last semester, yet my college experience has been enriching and eye opening.

I learn new things on a daily basis, as I should, and since I've been at Sac State, I've spent hours having conversations with my professors. I've had the opportunity to work with them on my campus service work, activism, and much more. And I'm getting used to it, but I even have their cell phone numbers, and we text regularly. And so the reason I graduate from Sac State will not just be because of me and what I do, it will be because of the people in my life, my fellow students, my mentors, my counselors, my professors, people who I can connect with and see on a daily basis--my family for the next three years. What we need now are not sacrifices to our education and well being. What we need now are investments to better the minds and skills of our future selves, our children, our Californians. To put it bluntly, the CSU will guarantee the success of California.

All the issues we face as a state starts at our schools, what we teach our youth, our future workforce, and how we treat our faculty, our current workforce, what higher education even means. So I urge this Committee to continue investing accordingly. Thank you.

Hello Assemblymembers. My name is Daniel Weinberg. I'm a fourth year Chemistry PhD student at UC Berkeley and a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a proud member of UAW 2865. I came to Berkeley for my PhD because Berkeley Chemistry is the best in the world, as President Drake said, and I want to work with the best scientists who research there.

The materials I studied for my PhD have already found their way into cutting edge displays, and they hold promise for green energy technologies and the growing fields of quantum information and quantum computing. Chemistry PhDs typically take five years, so I was expecting to have at least another year to complete my studies. But when I returned after settling on new contracts, I was told by my advisor that I had to graduate at the end of this semester. So just in four months.

This is not because a grant ran out on me, like President Drake alluded to. This is because this, in fact, will cut short my involvement in a long running grant and will require me to speed up training on several junior graduate students.

It puts me behind on my job search and to make it harder for me to find a job that aligns well with the skills that I've learned in my PhD. While UCOP and President Drake are asleep at the wheel, advisors are already cutting group sizes, which will hurt the research quality, which is what drew me to Berkeley in the first place. UC needs a plan to invest in the research and researchers in order to stay the best and continue to attract top scientific talent to California.

Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Michelle Andrews and I'm the Government Relations Chair for the UC Student Association and a fourth year undergrad at UC Davis. As you will hear from several other students who traveled from across the state to be here today, we are demanding better for all students.

So today I want to emphasize that the UC Student Association urges the Legislature to prioritize funding of the Cal Grant Equity Framework over the Middle Class Scholarship, to address the needs of the students who need financial aid the most. For many years, students from all three segments have been fighting for the Cal Grant for a reason. The lowest income students are the ones who count on the Cal Grant.

We are grateful to the Legislature for adopting the Cal Grant Reform Act and to the Governor for including funding for the Cal Grant Equity Framework in the plan for next year's budget, but we need you all to follow through on your promises to students. Listen to the students. We know what we need. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi. Alia Sky with staff for the UC Student Association. Disability-specific programs across the UC are chronically understaffed and underfunded to meet the needs of the increasingly expanding students with disabilities population. At most, UC's disability specialists or counselors see assigned to 400 to 500 students each, sometimes up to 1000 students each. Straightforwardly, this means that students with disabilities are unable to receive all of the services they need, and they experience immense wait times to receive the accommodations that they desperately need.

The UC Board of Regents have also expressed their desire to make historical changes in how they support disabled students. But before they can make historical steps, they need to take basic steps of adequately staffing their centers. They've made clear they will not be using funds from their 5% base increase or any other funds they have this year.

So we respectfully asked the Legislature to include our ask of $18.9 million in the budget, which would enable the UC to hire additional staff at DSPs across the UC to actually effectively support disabled students, and these students deserve equitable support and access to the UCs. And because I still have time, UCSA also believes that the UC needs to receive an increase in basic needs funding, commiserate to the CCs and the CSU.

UC basic needs centers have had a 40% increase of individual students that utilize them over the past three years, but no budget increase in those years, meaning these centers are able to give less resources to students who use them, while those same students experience historic inflation, housing crisis, and increased cost of living and need these basic needs resources more than ever. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Ritu Joshi. I am an undergrad at the UCR. At UCR, I'm a third year and I also stand with the UC Student Association. I'm here to talk about the housing crisis. So President Drake, who was out here earlier, said that housing is a huge priority for the UC community. And it is, but I don't think it is receiving the spotlight that it should. UCR in particular has a huge housing crisis.

And because our school happens to be on the smaller side with not as many students, it often does not receive the level of attention that is being described to you. Many students delay their education because of no housing. My personal friend had to delay her education one whole year with no financial compensation because she did not have a place to live. I know students right now that are living in their cars because they simply cannot find a place to live.

And let's not forget about the students who don't have a car to live in or don't have a friend's couch to sleep on. They still need the level of respect. They still need a place to live, a place to study, and a place to further their education goals. And I urge this Committee to look into housing as much as possible. Thank you.

Good afternoon, you all. I am Raja Allah, a first year at the University of California, Riverside. I want to reiterate what Ritu said about housing. Housing is possibly the most pressing issue to the University of California, Riverside. The University of California, Riverside is one of the only campuses in the UC to not offer guaranteed housing in any year. We have zero years guaranteed housing. On top of that, we have the highest commuter population out of any other UC.

We service the Inland Empire and we service a majority of the LA County. The fact that we don't have a place for students to affordably live on campus jeopardizes both their education and jeopardizes both their ability to be a part of the community that we have on campus. As a community that is built upon the idea of education, the idea of servicing those who need it in the State of California, we need to take action.

I look forward to hearing what the Committee has to say, and I hope that the Committee can support in favor of this Bill. Thank you.

All right. Hello. My name is Angel Renteria. I'm the Government Relations Director for the Associated Students of UC Riverside and I sit in the UC Student Association, representing UC Riverside. Today we drove over 430 miles to be here in Sacramento to voice the needs of UCR students, which is honestly very inaccessible for those who have disabilities.

So we are recommending the Legislature adds $18.9 million in permanent ongoing funding and $240,000 increased funding every year for at least the next four years to be dispersed to disability specific programs across the UCs. Though we may be a small campus, we often get overlooked. We are not part of these conversations and honestly, it is very burdensome that students with disabilities are not able to see a counselor.

The ratios that counselors to students have is disproportional and astronomical. In a campus of roughly 26,000 students, and one counselor for every 1000 to 1500 students, it just makes it inaccessible and we would just love to see more investment towards disability-specific programs and issues given that those students cannot be in these spaces today because they probably have a meeting that they've been waiting for so long to get with that counselor. So I would really ask you to take that into consideration. Thank you.

Thank you all for your testimony. I think we have one or two people on the telephone line. Moderator, are you there?

Yes. Thank you. For public comment, you may press one and then zero. Again, that is one and then zero for public comment. And we will go to line six. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Chair McCarty and Members, this is Zach Wooden, Vice President of the Legislative Affairs with the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, representing 1.8 million community college students. We echo the Committee's priorities of access and affordability, especially in the area of student basic needs, and want to thank Interim Chancellor Dr. Gonzales and Vice Chancellor O'Brien for the statements made and reports given. We greatly appreciate the Governor's proposed cost of living adjustment.

However, we are opposed to delaying funding for on campus housing and efforts to further defer maintenance. According to this Committee's informational hearing on November 8 2022, last year, 20% of community college students reported being homeless at some point in their educational journey. One way to address this is to provide on campus affordable housing. However, designing, planning and building housing takes time. This is not something that we can continue putting off.

We also continue to strongly support Cal Grant Reform, and recommend it be fully implemented when the time comes. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next we'll go to line 16. Your line is open.

Good morning chair McCarty and Members. Melissa Bardo on behalf of the Education Trust - West. We appreciate that the Governor's proposal provides significant base funding increases and supports enrollment at all three segments despite an overall budget deficit. However, to ensure that the state's investments go far, we continue to stress the importance of accountability, oversight and setting clear goals and metrics. It is not enough to identify where the equity gaps exist.

Segments must develop high impact strategies and metrics to close those gaps. It is also important to note that Cal Grant continues to be one of the most promising strategies to help students enroll in succeeding colleges. In response to the LAO's comments about MCS and Cal Grant funding, we respectfully ask the Legislature to prioritize Cal Grant Reform, as we debate tough choices ahead in this year and future budgets.

Lastly, we're excited to see statewide momentum towards expanding dual enrollment access, but we will note that capacity and support for school and community college districts will be crucial to successful implementation. Research highlights racial equity gaps, specifically among Black, Latinx and Native American students in dual enrollment access, and any strategies to increase access must center the needs of these students and families. Thank you.

Thank you. And next we'll go to line 18. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hello, my name is Trevor Griffey. I'm the Vice President of Legislation for the University Council American Federation of Teachers. We represent 6000 non-Senate faculty and librarians in the University of California system, and we are concerned about reports that UC campuses are planning on cutting graduate admissions and graduate student academic employee positions by about 20% to 30% at some campuses, and possibly system wide. How do you teach the same number of students, or even increase enrollment, while reducing the number of instructors, teaching assistants, and graders?

By increasing class size, by increasing discussion section size, by eliminating discussion sections entirely for lecture courses, and by pushing classes online, which is to say, by reducing the quality of instruction. President Drake says this is not his plan, but the LA Times and Sacramento Bee have documented that this is the plan of many chancellors in the UC system. As teachers and librarians, we at UC-AFT refuse to pretend that these cuts are not happening.

We encourage you to follow up on Assemblymember Fong and Muratsuchi's questions and continue to ask hard questions of the UC about graduate student enrollment. I also encourage you to ask critical questions about changes to class size and online education at UC, so that discussions about access don't obscure problems with declining educational quality. Thank you.

Thank you. And next we'll go to line 17. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair McCarty and Members of the Committee. My name is Gwen Chodur. I am a graduate student researcher at UC Davis, a proud member of UAW 2865, and also the co-founder of our graduate student pantry at UC Davis. For the past six years, I have been working on student basic needs issues, and this is something that has really played into my role as a teaching assistant, when I have students who come to me that they weren't able to do their homework because they didn't have Internet where they were sleeping in their car, or when they didn't eat yesterday and couldn't concentrate.

At the same time, we are now entering an era where the University of California, maybe not directed by the President, but at least encouraged by the President through not taking leadership at the UCOP level, is going to have more students per TA, at the same time that the state budget has also stayed flat for UC basic needs funding.

This means that fewer students will have access to these needed services, that they will compete for times with their TA and will have a reduced quality of education relative to what they had enjoyed previously. We can't allow this to happen. I thank you for the investment that you've made so far, but encourage you to continue to ask critical questions of the UC and their plans for the continuance and assurance of high quality education for all Californians. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And we have no further public comment in queue.

Thank you very much. With that, we will adjourn. Thank.