Berkley, Tuition Hike - Since Wed. night, students took over The University of California (UC) Berkley's Wheeler Hall as a protest against the tuition hike plan.
On Thursday, a 14-to-7 vote by the UC Board of Regents took place. The aim was to approve a plan which's outcome would be to raise the undergraduate tuition of all ten University of California campuses by a 28 percent over the next five years, the California Magazine reported.
This did not only cause displease among the students. In Berkley, a group composed by a number of approximately a hundred students protested in Wheeler Hall and vowed to stay until the regents agree to drop the tuition increase plan.
Still, classes will continue and the atmosphere was calm on Thursday.
"We don't want to stand aside the Regent saying, 'Oh yeah, we're stopping education as well.'"
"Rather the exact opposite-we want to sustain the ideals that education should be accessible to everyone and if we block the doors, it's the exact opposite of that," said Ivan Villaseñor Madriz, a Philosophy major and CBS noted.
On top of that, another member who argued against the tuition hike was California's Gov. Jerry Brown. He asked Napolitano, who conceived and proposed the plan of tuition hike, to study how costs could be cut instead of adopting the hike directly.
Some of the proposals were awarding degrees in three years instead of four and perhaps make more online courses, according to Time.
Under these changes, the tuition in California universities will go up to a cost of $12,804 next year and in five years, it would reach up to $15,564.
According to Napolitano, UC needs the 5 percent increase in tuition costs in order to afford higher payroll and retirement costs. Also, hire ore faculty and enroll 5,000 more California undergraduates in five years from now.
The whole tuition hike plan brings a lot of controversy and two very distinct sides of argument.
