A student walks near Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA
The new California budget includes $41 billion in funding for higher education. The budget, signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom last week, will increase higher education spending significantly but leaves some critical reforms to the financial aid system unfunded.
The increase in funding will mean additional support for students attending California colleges and universities. Highlights in the budget include a 5% spending increase for the University of California (UC) and the California State (Cal State) system and significant gains for the California Community College (CCC) system to improve direct support to the low-income students the system serves,
The CCC system will receive an additional $150 million to help the system grow enrollment and retention rates. These funds will help the system manage and hopefully reverse declining enrollment, mostly due to pandemic-related enrollment declines.
California Community colleges will receive $10 million in ongoing funding to support basic needs centers to support students facing food insecurity. Approximately fifty percent of CCC students are food insecure, according to research published in 2019, so this support is greatly needed. The system will also receive $10 million in funding to provide financial support for rapid re-housing efforts designed to support students facing homelessness or housing insecurity.
Between this budget and last year’s, California has allotted $2.2 billion for housing-related projects to provide expanded student housing for low-income students who have struggled to afford housing with California’s high rents.
In addition to the funding increases, the budget broadens access to the Cal Grant program by removing rules that prevented older students from accessing the grant programs. The proposed changes could increase the number of Cal Grant eligible students by 100,000. The changes ensure that increasingly older and more diverse students can receive support from California’s flagship financial aid program. Starting in 2024-25, the revised program rules will remove restrictions that prevented students from receiving a Cal Grant if they were more than one year out of high school. The changes also drop a high school GPA verification requirement and streamline the various and often confusing Cal grant types into Cal grant 2 (for community college students) and Cal Grant 4 (for students attending four-year institutions).
The changes to the Cal Grant program are currently unfunded and will require additional money in the higher education budget in 2024 to be fully enacted. Advocates have pushed for the streamlining and expansion of the Cal Grant program that these changes represent for several years. The improvements, while welcome, are being met with some disappointment that they are not currently funded.
A change sure to be welcomed by many Californians is $67.8 million in additional general funds for the UC system to continue increasing the enrollment of in-state students. The UC system, in particular, has faced criticism for enrolling nonresident students as access for California residents has gotten ever more challenging.
The UC system will maintain current growth plans by continuing the growth of 6,230 undergraduate students between 2018-19 and 2023-24. This increase in enrollment will include replacing over 900 nonresident undergraduate students with The UC system will receive $31 million in ongoing funding to offset the reduced tuition that in-state students pay compared to nonresidents. This funding will mostly go to the three campuses—UCLA, Berkeley, and UC San Diego—that enroll the most nonresident students. The Cal State System will grow by 9,434 full-time equivalent students in the 2022-23 academic year.
The budget is seen as a win for California students and institutions, with some advocates noting that this should be the start of continued increases if California is going to reverse declines in funding over the past two decades.
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