Jerry vs Janet

UC wants to hike tuition by 28%, Jerry Brown is none too happy.

CalWatch: Tuition increase

To help pay for UC’s spending increase, tuition increased 84 percent between 2007 and 2011. In Nov. 2014, the UC Board of Regents increased tuition and fees an additional 5 percent annually over the next five years to $15,564 from the current $12,192, pending legislative approval. The compounded increase is 28 percent.
Much of that tuition is supported by state taxpayers in the form of Cal Grants, which have increased from $295 million in 2007 to $882 million currently.
Some of the biggest cost drivers are employee salaries and benefits, retiree benefits and an increase in the hiring of administrators, according to the report:

• “The number of highly paid UC employees has grown significantly. Nearly 6,000 UC employees earn gross pay of $200,000 or more. [T]he number of these employees has grown by almost 100 percent during that period, and overall pay to this group amounted to $1.8 billion in 2013.
• “[A]dministrative staff, both in academics and other areas, grew far faster than faculty and faster than overall staff growth.” Tenure-track faculty increased just 3 percent from 2007-14, while senior management ballooned 32 percent and academic administrators grew by 19 percent.
• UC believes its faculty members are underpaid in comparison with other universities. On average, UC’s full professors receive $150,455, associate professors make $98,804 and assistant professors get $91,155.
• Pension benefits for more than 61,700 retirees and survivors total about $1.3 billion in the current year.
• Employee health care costs grew between 8 percent and 11 percent annually from 2007 to 2012. Cost increases have slowed since then, but are expected to rise 6 percent this year. In addition, UC spent more than $263 million on retiree health benefits in 2014. The current unfunded liability for retiree health care is $14 billion.

The UC spending boost, tuition hikes and requests for more state government funding have created pushback in Sacramento. Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, are both UC regents and voted against the tuition hikes in November.
Brown has offered a 4 percent increase ($119.5 million) in General Fund support for UC. But only if there is no tuition hike, out-of-state enrollment doesn’t increase and UC begins to rein in costs. Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano have been meeting to work out their differences, with a report expected at the UC Board of Regents‘ meeting March 17-19.

So, explain  how exactly California is going to pay for Obamacare and the UC gravy train at the same time? One would think that our Floundering legislature would have figured some of this out already. Jerry has no answer, really, since he is still committed to the $68 billion train, travelling through  Jim Costa's district in Fresno, from LA to SF. Look at a map. Then, on top of all this we still have the pension problem, which ties taxes to the stock market.  Not too brilliant.

So, that is why California is called the Flounder State.