UCOP SharePoint Feedback Regarding 2013-2014 PDST Proposals

To Whom It May Concern:

I would like to provide a student’s response to the narrative portion of the UC Davis School of Law—King Hall 2013-14 Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition proposal. The cost of attending King Hall, and all UC professional schools, is an issue that concerns me. The King Hall law students have been very involved over the past year in organizing and understanding why we are now the most expensive public law school in the nation. This organization and concern is missing in the narrative of the proposal.

My involvement dates back to my first year as a law student in 2010. Before joining King Hall, I was under the impression that the tuition would remain relatively stable at $41,763. However, each semester the cost of attendance seemed to rise with no warning and no explanation. I joined a committee formed by the Law Student Association (LSA) that was tasked with finding out more information. However, the committee was given very little power and direction. We were unsuccessful in understanding how and why our fees continued to rise.

In the second semester of my second year, April 2012, I attended a forum hosted by the Chancellor’s Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Committee. The forum hosted each Professional School Dean and an introduction by Sarah Mangum of the UC Davis Budget & Institutional Analysis Division. I learned two important things at this meeting. First, I learned what the Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition was and how it was set. Before this meeting, I had no idea who set what fees. I had no idea that the King Hall administration had such an important role in deciding increases. I had no idea that professional schools as a whole relied on relatively very little support from the State of California. 

Second, I heard astonishing remarks by the various Deans. When I asked why tuition continued to rise, they gave comments that the market allows them charge so much, that if they charged less applicants would think it was an inferior school, and that they wanted to expand their programs to be the best ranked programs possible and this required paying faculty high salaries. Although the merits of the last remark can be debated, the first two shocked me. The rationale was basically: we’re charging this much because we can, and no one is holding us back.

After the meeting I approached Mrs. Mangum and asked her more about the PDST proposals. She told me that they were public information, and all I had to do was ask Dean Johnson for a copy of the law school’s PDST proposal. Although the forum was not well attended, I left feeling that this was information that many law students, and professional students would be interested in. Even if the students didn’t show up to the forum, this information should be readily available online, in an easy to read format.

Within two weeks of the forum, I e-mailed Dean Johnson asking for the proposal. He responded quickly, saying that they were still working on it, but that he will forward it to me in a couple of weeks, around mid-June. By the end of August I still had no response. I followed up, asking if it was done. Dean Johnson responded that they were still working on it. By September, I filed a California Public Records Request for the PDST. Dean Johnson then e-mailed me a copy of the PDST proposal within twelve hours. 

There were portions of the PDST that surprised me. First, one of the documents showed that the proposal must make predictions in three year intervals. Those predictions of fee levels had been accurate every single year during my time at King Hall. This meant that the administration had predicted, to the dollar amount, what my tuition level was going to be for three years. There was no uncertainty or ambiguity as I had been lead to believe during my first year. I felt cheated and lied to. I should have been given these predictions as an entering student so that I could accurately gauge what my total cost of attending King Hall would be.

Another section surprised me concerning student input. The section stated that to gain student feedback, the LSA President had been informed each year of the PDST proposal. I remember as a first year law student, the LSA president Scott Vignos being very concerned with rising tuition. That is why he created the committee I served on. I felt that if he had had this information, he would have shared it. After e-mailing him asking if he had received this information, he said he never did. The current and past four years of LSA Presidents all responded the same. 

Finding out all of this information really upset me. I felt that the administration was not being forthcoming with critical information to students and misleading the Chancellor and Regents regarding the student feedback on PDST proposals. I immediately started working with the current LSA President, Nima Rahimi. 

I told Nima that I wanted three things: a public forum informing students about the PDST, a student budget committee set up to be the authority on fees at King Hall, and an annual circulation of the King Hall budget presented in a simple easy to understand format. Together, Nima and I put these demands into a letter format and he sent it out as an open letter to Dean Johnson on behalf of LSA. It was sent on September 12, 2012. Shortly thereafter, Dean Johnson agreed to attend the Town Hall meetings.

The students then organized, advertised, and supported the town hall meetings, taking place on October 2 and 9th. These two events allowed for an opportunity for the Dean’s office to provide information to the student body and for the student body to voice their questions and concerns. They were both well attended. I would agree that, in the narrative’s terms, it was cordial and respectful. However, students left the town halls feeling frustrated. Like me, they felt as though many felt as though had been lied to for three years. 

Students also felt as though they still had not been given a proper accounting of why, exactly, the cost of attending UC Davis continues to rise. Every time someone asked why it costs close to $10,000 more per student now than it did three years ago, they got a different answer. The answers ranged from the new building, to new faculty, to new clinics, to decreasing state funding. The ambiguity and lack of evidence to support their assertions lead to a general mistrust toward the administration.

We were given a basic pie chart of what categories the school spends its money on. However, we were told that due to a change in the administration, there was no current accounting detailing why the costs continued to rise. We were told to be patient, and they would collect the data and share it with us when it became available.

Although frustrated, many students and I saw this as a step in the right direction. While waiting for the hiring of a new assistant Dean, I decided to look to other law schools as comparisons of how money is spent and raised. I filed California Public Records requests at UC Hastings, Los Angeles, and Berkeley asking for simple accounting of how they spent and raised their money. Their responses was astounding, each said that they don’t keep such records. 

There are really only two possibilities to justify this response. First, the schools really don’t keep these records. Which would mean that large institutions responsible for huge amounts of tax payer and student money are failing to meet the basic requirements of accounting considered that would fail any fiduciary duty. The second option is that they didn’t want to give me the information, because they consider it a trade secret. I had informally heard this logic from the King Hall administration. They don’t want to publish how they spend the money, because other schools could copy it. This mentality is counter to all principles of community, transparency, and the law of California under the California Public Records Act. 

I am astonished that there has not been a consolidated place online where anyone, student, tax payer, or interested party and check to see how all UCs spend their money. The UCs will not be fully transparent or held accountable to the public until this is done.

By January 2013, the LSA set up the Student Budget Committee. I submitted an application and was appointed Chair. When I asked for more detailed information that was promised during the Town Halls in October, I was told to wait because we were still hiring a new Assistant Dean. 

In the meantime, the Student Budget Committee decided to collect our own information. We wanted to focus on the question of if law school is still a valuable investment for students. The administration continued to assert that even at close to $50,000 a year, UC Davis Law was a good investment. However, no one has asked the most basic question to determine if law school is worth the investment: what is the average monthly debt to income ratio of graduated law students?

Having an accurate picture of the debt to income ratio of each graduating class is the only way to elegantly analyze if law school is a good investment. It is the only measure to focus on the heart of the value question: are law students are able to manage their debt after graduation? And yet in all of the conjecture, I have never seen a survey of the debt to income ratio of law students.

To answer the question, the Student Budget Committee put together a poll. I’ve written about the results on my blog here. We had about half of the Class of 2013 respond to our survey. Based on their responses, the average monthly payments students will pay to service their debt will account for 16% of their paycheck for ten years. For one quarter of the students, it will account for 25% of their paycheck or more. The effect of these numbers depends on the income. 16% of $160,000 a year feels like a lot less than 16% of $80,000 a year. 

This is an easy survey to conduct. Career Services already surveys students collecting information about income of law students. Financial Aid already knows student debt levels. The last step is to simply match each student’s debt to income. This should not be an effort of one student group at one law school. The collection and publication of this data should be demanded by all who have an opinion on the value of law school. It should be published on the UC Davis Law website, so each applicant knows exactly what they are investing in.  

These numbers should also be a restriction on whether a program can increase its PDST. If a program is consistently graduating a class with a debt to income ratio of over ten percent, they should not be allowed to increase the PDST. A constituently high debt to income ratio is a reliable measure of if the school is providing value for its tuition dollars. A high ratio means the tuition is too high and cannot be justified.  

In the late spring 2013, another student who had filed California Public Records requests finally got some responses from other schools. We were excited to finally have some numbers to compare to our spending here at King Hall. However, when we looked further, we realized that the numbers were not even compatible. Different schools classified state funding to include some money, while others classified it as tuition dollars. We realized that there are no standards of accounting across the same programs with in the UC system. It meant we were comparing apples and oranges, and the information was useless. For such a large and important institution in California, it is very disappointing to find that no one has pushed for a standard of basic accounting to be able to compare each program. 

I graduated in May 2013. The new Student Budget Committee members have taken the reigns. Along with new Assistant Dean Burns, they have taken on the difficult task of forming a more detailed and accurate picture of why the costs of King Hall continue to rise. I am pleased to see signs of increased transparency, such as the UC Davis Budget & Institutional Analysis Division website posting each program’s PDST proposals. This SharePoint portal is encouraging as a means for students to communicate directly with UCOP. Dean Burns has promised to publish the timeline of costs. Last, I have heard that the Regents are voting on reforming the procedures for PDST proposals. The proposal sounds like it should accomplish many good things.

However, there is so much more work to be done. The administration’s PDST proposal narrative stated that “[t]he deans received little direct feedback after the budget forums.” This statement misrepresents the hard work of so many students to find out more about tuition. It is belittling of the honest concern students have consistently demonstrated over the cost of attending King Hall. The burden is not on the students to check in on the budget and fee setting process. Instead, the administration must actively and effectively elicit the input of students. This statement reflects a mindset that present in many administrations. Although students are sometimes distracted with our studies and extracurricular activities, investment in our education is an issue that deeply affects us all. Each administration must take affirmative steps to ensure all students are informed.

I hope that this narrative provides a fuller picture of the PDST proposal here at King Hall. The Regents and UCOP should take the initiative to ensure that each program is fulfilling its fiscal duties to inform the students of how their tuition dollars are being spent. The follow steps would be monumental to ensuring the transparency and vitality of UC programs:

1. Establish a formal mechanism that all programs must follow to inform the students of the PDST process. This must be more than an e-mail. Programs must make a meaningful outreach to educate students on how their fees are set. 
2. There should be a higher burden on justifying PDST increases. Giving vague terms of “increased costs” to maintain program rankings is not sufficient. The programs must show why it must cost more this year than last. 
3. All PDSTs should be posted online in a place easily accessible by applicants, current students, and the public. 
4. All programs should collect and publicly publish their debt to income ratios. This should be used as a restriction on raises in PDST. 
5. There must be a system wide accounting standard. Basic accounts must all be published online in a place easily accessible by applicants, current students, and the public. 

If you have any questions regarding this narrative or my suggestions, please feel free to contact me e-mail hpcantua@ucdavis.edu or 925-784-1396.

Sincerely,

Heather Cantua
J.D. UC Davis School of Law 2013