College tuition has always been a concern for upcoming college students. However, San Francisco is working to diminish that worry. Recently, the City College of San Francisco has made their tuition free to all city residents. They are the first college in the USA to offer free tuition, and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced on the official San Francisco website that the city would be setting aside $5.4 million dollars to pay for tuition.
“As a child of working-class immigrants, I know first-hand the importance of a college education and the struggles to pay for it,” said Mayor Lee. The mayor plans to work together with the city to formulate an economic plan that would make City College accessible to the city of San Francisco. Mayor Lee continues, “This commitment will provide our residents the opportunity to attend college, continue to learn and create better lives for themselves. This is an investment in our youth, in our city and in our future.”
The plan will also provide the City College of San Francisco with a one-time amount of $500,000 for capacity and systems to implement the plan. Currently, California residents can be eligible for the California Community Colleges Board of Governors (BOG) Fee Waiver, which permits enrollment fees to be waived. However, this waiver does not cover the cost of books and supplies. The new program will provide $500 annually to full time students and $200 annually to part time students that have a BOG fee waiver to use for books, transportation, supplies, and health fees.
States like New York and Rhode Island have also tried to give free tuition. New York’s plan was to give free tuition to households that made less than $125,000 a year, and in Rhode Island Govenor Gina Raimondo proposed two years of free tuition at state colleges for students in both community colleges and four year institutions.
Despite this step towards decreasing college tuition, the University of California has made plans to increase their college tuition. Many students worry about tuition rates, and in-state tuition can cost up to $12,918 without boarding and supplies. According to CNN, forty million Americans have student loan debt, and the total debt amounts to about $1.2 trillion.
The University of California put a proposal to increase tuition by two and a half percent, and non-residents would have to pay a five percent increase in their supplemental tuition. Financial aid would cover this increase for two-thirds of the California resident population. “We’re at the point where if we don’t do this, if we don’t invest, the quality of education is going to suffer,” UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein told the Los Angeles Times. “We want these students to have the same or better experience than students who came before them.”
Students have opposed the announcement about the increase of tuition. Even with the financial aid, students do not have enough money because of the pricey areas in which the UC’s are located in. Many students want a decrease in the cost of the UC tuition and fees, which have more than doubled since 2006 and are at their highest level in history.
Klein told the Los Angeles Times that all the money received from the increase of tuition would go to help the students. For example, students would receive more financial aid, as one-third of the money would go to student awards and the state funded Cal-Grant and Middle Class Scholarship programs. The money would also go into hiring more faculty to lower class sizes to improve the quality of learning for students. The money would also pay for more counselors, tutors, mental-health counselors, graduate-student fellowships and improvements to classroom spaces.
However, Ralph Washington Jr., the UC Student Association president, disagreed with Klein. Washington thought that if the new faculty were not sufficiently diverse, they would not improve the campus climate for marginalized students. Washington would prefer to see more money spent on issues such as sexual misconduct cases and support for hungry students.
The United States has had the debate on free college tuition for a while, and San Francisco may be a jumping point for which California, and eventually the rest of the United States, can begin to offer more affordable tuition.