It looks like in retaliation to a massive grad student worker strike,
the university of California institutions are now
threatening massive cuts to the doctoral programs, okay, and
that's despite the fact the universities are sitting on a massive mountain of cash.
Now, we covered the initial strike and what the concerns were, namely
the insanely low pay that goes along with those positions, but here's what we know.
In January United Auto Workers, UAW, the union that represents tens
of thousands of academic employees reported that dozens of departments
at UCs around the state were planning to reduce graduate enrollment for
the upcoming school year as much as 33% and
reduce teaching assistant positions as much as 30%.
So the workers >> That must have been a hard time I mean,
it's really really hard times.
It breaks their heart to do this but >> The amount of money they have is
insane, which we'll get to in just a moment.
You don't wanna miss that.
But in addition to all of this the departments are planning to eliminate
TA discussion sections, increase the number of students enrolled
in discussion section, so less TAs, more students, okay.
>> You don't mean there will be no more TA discussion things.
You just mean there will be fewer of them with more people in them.
>> It says eliminate TA discussion sections,
increase the number of students enrolled in discussion sections.
>> Well, I mean some of the sections might be some of them but not all of them.
>> Okay, got it.
>> So basically condensing more people into fewer things,
which is gonna be harder for the TAs and worse for the students.
>> 100% >> Awesome.
>> Yes, >> Thank you for doing that UC system.
>> You guys, they charge so much money for tuition and
the workers here because of their organizing and because of their strike,
managed to secure a little bit of a bump in their pay and
then after that this is what they do.
They're like not a big deal.
We're going to eliminate a bunch of your positions and for those who remain,
you're gonna have a heavier workload and we have a lot of money but too bad, okay.
So at the same time, UCs are planning to increase undergraduate employment,
sorry, enrollment by 4200 this upcoming school year according to the LA Times.
So again workers will have less support but way more work.
And then there's another massive problem with this move.
The supposed decide comes after the University of California signed
a compact with the Governor of California,
Gavin Newsom to increase graduate enrollment by 2500 in the next four years.
In exchange, the University of California did receive a lot of money,
okay, to the tune of, I can't believe, $200,542,000 for
the 2022 to 2023 school year alone.
>> Increases, and by the way that is a small percentage increase.
That even though it's a small percentage increase is hundreds of millions of
dollars to give you an idea of the totality of the funding that goes to it.
>> Hundreds of millions of dollars for one year.
I mean there's no excuse they can pay the workers without
having to cut all of these discussion sections, TA jobs, it's insane.
The University of California's office of the Chief Investment Officer announced
that its assets under management grew to 186 billion with a b as of June 30th 2021,
29% jump over the prior fiscal year and the largest one year gain in its history.
The additional $38 billion in assets over the previous year
represents a 77% increase since 2014.
What is going on?
>> Clearly their investments in NFTs paid off I guess, I don't know.
That's an amazing amount of money.
If you were in charge of that, would you ever stop laughing?
You just wake up begin laughing at the amazing good fortune
that you found yourself in and then go to sleep in the same way.
No, it's madness, it's it's effectively infinite money, it's stupid money.
Maintaining the same level of TA support and discussion sections support for
an increase in students would seem to be an abdication of your educational
obligations to the students at that point to do it.
Instead we're you're cutting a third of them, is madness.
I don't think it should take me a former TA to tell you that they exist for
a reason, they're there.
And by the way, the discussion sections or whatever is certainly a part of it,
I mean, some people will ignore those and never go to them,
some people will get a lot out of them.
But that is just one of many things that they do, they Proctor exams, they fill in
teaching classes when the professor is not available, I did that quite frequently.
I ran an experimental lab, I also did research help for the actual professors.
We do actual research, helping to produce the academia that buttresses the,
I guess the reputation of the university, there's many things they do.
They're hurting the value of the degree going forward,
not just the education you get, but what it's gonna be worth going forward because
the reputation of the university is going to suffer over time.
>> No, I mean, it's insane.
And also one of the other thing that's gonna happen, and
this happened when I was in graduate school, it was incredibly frustrating.
It was at a time when the economy, it was around 2008, so the economy collapsed.
And so the CSU system, California State University system,
along with every university that was publicly funded,
experienced some severe budget cuts, right?
And so what ended up happening was the school didn't
offer one of the classes I needed in my final semester.
So I ended up taking all the remaining classes, and
then I had to enroll for an additional semester, pay for
an additional semester for that one class, just that one class.
>> I bet they hated that that had to happen.
>> They loved it.
I'm sure they loved it, right?
And you look, the way that it works is, you don't pay based on units,
you pay based on the semester, right?
Either you're a part time student or a full time student.
Since I was taking one class, it was part time status, but
it's still thousands of dollars for that one semester and that one class.
Sucks, yeah, this is I guess their underhanded version of playing hardball
and, and the tactic they're willing to use is the experience of the actual students.
So generally when you strike back against a union,
you are gambling that you'll be able to break their will or whatever, and
while you're doing that, they will try to push back.
They'll try to get people interested,
they'll try to get the media to pay attention.
Generally, that doesn't work, although over the past few years it's been more
successful, more people are paying attention to these sorts of students.
But in this particular case, they're hurting the students, too.
The students should be fighting back, many of the parents who
are probably paying a lot of money towards this should be freaking out over this.
You're paying, I don't even wanna guess, $50,000 a year or more, I don't know
>> At this point, and think about students
who decide to come to the UC System from out of state, they end up paying more.
>> Exactly, yeah the parents should be rallying to stop this.
Cut 0.2% into just the increase in your endowment over the last year.
>> Exactly. And give the grad students the experience
they need, and
make sure that there are enough of them that the university can actually operate.
The professors should be incredibly frustrated by this because this is gonna
mean more work for them as well.
>> And by the way I mean in terms of the agreement that they reached with
the UC System, the workers who strike,
I mean they didn't even come close to getting what they had asked for.
So the biggest positive change had to do with their
base salary which went from $23,250 to $35,000.
So that's their base salary now, 35,000 how dare they, they're so greedy,
$35,000, wow.
And there's all sorts of other things that they asked for, they did not get.
It was far below the $54,000 they were asking for during these negotiations.
Workers are also gonna get an additional two weeks of paid parental leave.
So it was initially six weeks now they get eight weeks.
That's pretty good, I like that, that's a positive change.
But there are all sorts of other things they asked for they didn't get.
They didn't even meet the workers halfway, not even close.
And for what they did get,
this retaliation from the UC System is disgusting, again especially when
you consider how much money they're sitting on, there's no reason for this.
They're hurting everyone, including the workers in this case, and
also as John perfectly stated,
the students who are paying a ton of money to get quality education.