Comparing King Hall's Ethnic and Socioeconomic Diversity to other Professional Schools

In a previous post, I noted that the racial and socioeconomic diversity has been falling at King Hall since 2005. How does that compare to other Professional Degree programs at UC Davis?

Here is a chart showing racial diversity at all Professional programs at UC Davis from 2009-11 (source):

Here is a chart showing the socioeconomic diversity of each program, as measured by Pell Grants received as an undergraduate (source):

These charts demonstrate that there are some professional programs with a less diverse student body than King Hall. They also demonstrate that some programs, Masters of Public Health, Medical School, and Veterinary Medicine, have successfully increased the racial or socioeconomic diversity of their student body.

Prop 209 prohibits schools from using race in admissions decisions. However, it does not require a blindness to the racial or socioeconomic diversity of our school. Other programs have effectively increased their diversity. We should collaborate with them to understand how they are achieving their goals and how we can incorporate similar measures here at King Hall.

Know Your Fees

The total estimated tuition and fees at King Hall is $49,564 for the 2012-13 school year. This total can be broken down into several tuitions and fees that are set and controlled by different people. Here is a blog post explaining the different tuitions system wide.

In that same spirit, here is a break down of the total tuition here at King Hall:

As you can see, $34,182 or 69% of the total fees for instate students is set and controlled by the law school under the name Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition or "PDST."  The Budget Committee can have a significant impact on the total cost of attendance here at King Hall by working with administrators in the building. 

Class of 2013 Student Debt and Income Levels Survey

The budget committee had our first meeting today, and we have hit the ground running.

Below is a survey we would like 3Ls at King Hall to fill out on their current debt and expected income level upon graduation. This information will enable us to update the current statistics on the debt to income ratio of King Hall students. It will also allow us to obtain more detail about our entire class profile, instead of the averages provided to us.

We have a goal of 75% of the class of 2013 to respond to this survey. If you are a 3L at King Hall, please take one minute to fill it out.

To fill out on separate page, visit: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1G0mUw3aM_XJwTnFtK6QdeoEapIYjYWDwizV1s-TGbso/viewform

The Regent's "Return to Aid" Policy at King Hall

In the fall, the LSA and the King Hall administration hosted a Town Hall to discuss tuition. At that meeting, the administration distributed a pamphlet outlining the expenditures at King Hall.

Here is what we were given:

There is a lot in this handout. In this blog post, I am going to focus on one of the most significant expenditures, "Return to Aid." This is highlighted above in the box on the right.  Regent rule 1303  requires at least 33% of Professional School's tuition be redistributed to students in the form of financial aid. In compliance with this, King Hall spends about $8,652,000 on various forms of financial aid every year.

One aspect of financial aid are scholarships and grants. Here is a chart provided by the administration roughly outlining the average amount of scholarships and grants in 2011-12:

 

Although a helpful outline, this chart is not detailed. 30% of students receiving between half and full scholarships and grants seems like a lot, but the distribution within that range is not known. There could be a bulk of student receiving just over half of tuition in scholarships, with only a few receiving  more than that. Another important detail would be to know what portion of Financial Aid is spent on Scholarships and Grants. Are there other forms of financial aid that do not fall in this pie chart?

Most importantly, this chart does not distinguish between need, merit, and retention scholarships and grants. Who receives scholarships and grants, and why, is a black box. In the 2011-14 PDST proposal, King Hall explained their Financial Aid policy as following:

These vague commitments to recruit the "best" students and "underrepresented students" are not supported by statistics. Since 2005, our ability to recruit the best students or underrepresented students has not increased.

The entering class LSAT and GPA 25-75% have remained relatively the same.

Entering Class of 2005 (source):

Entering Class of 2012 (source):

 The enrollment of under represented students is also falling abysmally (source): 

King Hall must follow the Regent Policy of 33% going to return to aid. This policy is a well-intentioned policy to force schools to redistribute funds back to students. However, King Hall has not demonstrated that it is using these funds effectively for either stated purpose of recruiting top students or underrepresented students. Many students are receiving substantial scholarships or grants, but to what end? What is the real purpose behind return to aid at King Hall?

The policy should be examined closely at the Regent level. There are two clear options. The first option is to enforce the stated purpose of the return to aid by requiring successful recruitment of highly qualified or under represented students.The enforcement mechanism must require more than an aspirational statement. It should require higher disclosure requirements such as describing the formula used for distributing need based and merit based aid, and disclosing the 25%-median-75% distribution of merit and need based aid. 

Alternatively, lower the return to aid requirement in exchange for a correlating reduction in overall tuition. The potential benefits of substantially reducing tuition would reduce the sticker shock of $50K a year for a public education. This would arguably be a more effective way to recruit the best and underrepresented students than our current broken system.

How to File a Public Records Request at a UC Campus

Obtaining information from a California public university is simple. The California Public Records Act (PRA) is codified in Government Code Section 6250 et seq.  It gives all members of the public a right to (most) documents in state institutions. Here is a neat summary done by the LA Times. Here are the 2012 Guidelines Published by the California Attorney General. 

Here are my three easy steps for  obtaining records from a UC school:

Step 1: Know the scope: The PRA applies to all state and local agencies, including the University of California. It only applies to documents already in existence, you cannot request them to create documents.  “Records” include any writing owned, used or maintained by the Department in the conduct of its official business. Writings include information recorded or stored on paper, computers, email, or audio or visual tapes.

Step 2: E-mail the appropriate contact: Here is a list of the contacts for each campus in the UC system. Simply send him or her a succint e-mail detailing the documents what documents you would like. To cite to the statute giving you the right to the records, use California Constitution, Article I, Section 3, subdivision (b) and the California Public Records Act (Government Code Section 6250-6276.48).

Step 3: Wait: You must receive responsive documents within ten days. If not, follow the steps in this nifty handout by the First Amendment Project. You may not always get what you want on your first request. Sometimes this is a problem of not knowing what you want, or not knowing who to ask. Being patient (and cordial) is key to finding the records you are looking for.

Some tips from the First Amendment Project handout:

Where will it end?

I just found this great graphic from the UC Accountability Report 2012. It demonstrates the skyrocketing PDST UC wide.

Professional degree average student charges, Universitywide, 1994-95 to 2010-11

Eyeballing these numbers, most of these programs show a 100-400% increase in tuition in just over a decade. This is steep, even relative to the rapidly rising in undergraduate tuition.

The question to ask is how long is this sustainable? Is there a point when tuition cannot go any higher? I'd like to think so.

Introduction to the student budget committee

The students of King Hall have finally put together a student committee with the sole purpose of investigating the UC Davis King Hall Budget. This committee has a wide charge, collecting information on student fees and expenditures at King Hall, publishing information on a wide range of topics, and advocating on behalf of students to keep higher education in California open to all.

This committee has taken awhile to be put in place. But now that we're here, I hope that the committee will maintain a space in the institution where students, administrators, and faculty can engage in an informed discussion on the budget of King Hall.

One of the first issues to tackle is the Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition (PDST). This is a fee added to nine programs here at UC Davis, and any Professional program UC wide. Here is a graphic of the fees at UC Davis. The yellow indicates the PDST level.

 

It is easy to see that this fee represents a large portion of the cost of attending professional programs at UC Davis,especially for law students. This fee has gained a lot of attention in the past, and has been the subject of at least two settlements with the Regents.

This fee is set by each program's administration. For our purposes, the King Hall administration. Regent Policy 3103 requires that students are consulted on this process and that their views are represented on the Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition plan submitted to the school's Chancellor and Regents.

King Hall students largely feel that this consultation process has been severely lacking. The PDST plans contain representations that the students disagree with. One example is the selection of comparison institutions used to justify the current cost of attending King Hall. This infographic demonstrates that there is a wide disparity between the comparison schools chosen by the administration, and ones that outside observers would deem comparable. 

This, and other issues, will be the initial focus of the student budget committee at King Hall. 



-Heather Cantua
Interim Student Budget Committee Chair
King Hall Class of 2013
hpcantua@ucdavis.edu