Transcript of Bear in Mind January 14, 2008: Access and Affordability

Chancellor Birgeneau: We at Berkeley have the privilege of working for what is one of the lead public research and teaching universities in the United States and we're a land grant institution and our obligation as a land grant institution is to serve the people of California, that's all the people at California. So, it’s our obligation to ensure that any young Californian, no matter what their back ground is, what their financial capabilities are, whether or not their parents went to college to enable them to attend Berkeley and this usually comes under the rubric of access and affordability and I wonder if each of you could just go around and tell us how you think about access and affordability, how you define it, and what the challenges are for us in order to achieve it. Starting with Suzy.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Thank you Chancellor. Well in my mind access and affordability are the key values that are really inherent in our charter, in the Organic Act. It speaks to why the university needs to attract and also engage everyone from every socioeconomic strata. So I am totally, when I think of access and affordability, I think of it as two sides of the opportunity coin. That one can indeed get the academic credentials eligible to enroll in the university but, unless you have the financial resources to do so perhaps you won't be able to get through that door.

Walter Robinson: I also think it is important to think in terms of opportunity as one level, access as another level and then affordability as a third. Opportunity without access is almost criminal. We have opportunity; anyone can come if they've done the work and they're eligible to a UC. The next level is accessibility and do you have the information to take full advantage of the opportunity? Do you have the resources in order to take advantage of the opportunity because that also is part of the whole access question. So our challenge is to make sure that this very diverse state that we live in, that people, wherever they may be, have all the information they need to be able to take full advantage and to have access. Then the ultimate challenge is where to find the funding to support them through their four years of undergraduate education. In some cases, five.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: I think one of the greatest tragedies for us is that we work so hard in outreach and in our admissions process to get the best students here and I think the greatest loss would be if, because of resource reasons, we would be unable then to allow them to come in and fully enroll at classes here. To me that would be the greatest tragedy for UC.

Chancellor Birgeneau: Gibor?

Gibor Basri: Yeah I think I want to elaborate on what Suzy started with, which is the nature of this institution… and … it’s a land grant institution. Those were set up originally to enable the state to take full advantage of its resources. In the old days that might have meant mining and agriculture and so on but, in the 21st century the state’s resources are primarily its people and all of its people and that's why we see this as a core part of our mission to provide access and affordability to all parts of the state, so that the people with high potential to become leaders or businessmen or community leaders, to make the state function in the 21st century as the best state it can be. We have to allow those people to come to Berkeley and that means they have to be able to get the opportunity to get the academic grounding that they all need to be here but, we also don't want to have a filter at the end that says "and uh if you're not in a situation where your family has a lot of assets, even though you have a lot of potential to help the state in the future, we can't help you because you simply can't afford it."

So access and affordability are there as principles we need in order to allow the state to make use of its resources for this century and that's why the state supports its public university system.

Chancellor Birgeneau: In fact at the present time, we're reasonably successful in access and accessibility. Of course because of 209 our undergraduate student body is not as diverse as it needs to be but, in terms of economic diversity I believe approximately 1/3, a little less than 1/3, of our students receive federal Pell grants, which means that their family income is under about $40,000 a year and this compares to about 10% at the elite ivy league institutions and so both percentage wise and in terms of absolute numbers we have many more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and I wonder if any of you have any comments on why we're successful now but, why we're challenged, we'll be challenged in maintaining that as we go forward.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: I think its a matter of numbers. I really do believe that the fact that 75% of our students are on some form of financial aid speaks volumes. We're a huge institution and just the ability to obtain sufficient resources to meet every individual student's need is a daunting task. So in the, for the short run we may be adequately handling things but, in the long run I think the challenge will just get worse as the state, state budget challenges emerge, the federal government has other challenges it needs to address and, you know, everyone looks home to what is the most, you know, they go bargain hunting with education and my great fear in this is that in bargain hunting students will close doors that really are the doors they should be going forward through in order to advance their particular skills and talents, for the greater good for themselves but, even for the state of California.

Gibor Basri: And I, and certainly our current success must be in large part a reflection of the fact that we have kept to our values as a public institution, you know. We don't, we could engineer our admissions process differently so that we had only affluent students and didn't worry about the social mobility that the public institution provides. We also could not worry about whether we had a diverse student body and not care whether students, when they came here, learned how to operate in basically the same kind of environment that the state itself provides. So we could do it that way and we haven't chosen to do it that way and now our challenge is that some of the other institutions which are of our quality but which don't really share our values have gotten into such an advantageous position that it’s becoming difficult to us to provide affordability here compared with affordability in some of those places.

Chancellor Birgeneau: So, according to our own data, this year the cost to come here, let's say you're from Southern California and you come to Berkeley as an undergraduate student and you live in a student residence. The total cost is about $25,000 of which about $7,200 represents student fees, then on top of that its health insurance, food, room and board, transportation and et cetera, right? And, how do people manage this $25,000?

I know this is quite mysterious. Now for well to do families, presumably $25,000 isn't an excessive burden but, for someone whose family income is $20,000 working at a $25,000 bill can really be quite shocking. Now I know because I've spent a lot of time on it and I'll talk a little more about that shortly. That the key concept or key number isn't the $25,000 dollar number for a poor student, it’s the self help level. And Suzy maybe you can help explain what the self help level is because I know that's quite mysterious and confusing to many people

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Absolutely. Self help is actually the combination of work and loan that every individual student who is on financial aid is required to commit to in accepting their financial aid package. It’s a number that each financial institution actually backs into once you take the total number of students that need aid and you take a look at all of the resources available to you both from the federal, state, and UC level and exactly what is left over is what constitutes self help minus whatever a parent contribution might be.

Chancellor Birgeneau: And what is the self help level at Berkeley this year?

Susanna Castillo-Robson: For this year it’s $8,000 and it’s actually increased in the last 7 years by 50%’ and if we're not careful by the end of the decade we may be approaching doubling that figure.

Gibor Basri:(?) So let me clarify. By self help at $8,000 you mean that of the $25,000 the system will take care of all but the $8,000. Is that what that means?

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Not just the system. Part of it is parental contribution. So it really does depend on what your parents can contribute based on a federal formula that arrives at what your parent contribution level is.

Gibor Basri: But if your family earns $20,000 then presumably that contribution is pretty small? How does that work?

Susanna Castillo-Robson: At $20,000 I can guarantee there would be no parental contribution! So, indeed it would be a matter of federal and state grants and then the work loan contribution of the student.

Walter Robinson: I think also as we talk about this, the particularly low, middle income families that don't qualify for a lot of the federal financial aid programs and don't have $25,000 laying around, it’s particularly challenging, especially considering of the size of that population coming through the high schools and probably making up the majority of the 12.5% UC eligible students.

Chancellor Birgeneau: I've been, for the last while chairing a committee for the system as a whole on accessibility and on self help. The statistics are actually quite frightening as Suzy indicated. So for the system as a whole the self help level this year is a little over $9,000.

We predict 10 years from now, in the 2017-2018 academic year, that the self help level will rise to $16,700,which is an extraordinary number. So we now have this extraordinary situation where we can imagine Walter sends out a letter of admission to a student whose family income is $20,000 a year and says "Congratulations you made it into Berkeley. We're going to do whatever we can to enable you to come here, but by the way you and your family over the next 4 years are going to have to provide $66,800." This is impossible. And so, this actually is, probably, can indeed earn the word crisis. I don't like to use the word crisis but, I believe that we do have an impending crisis and that we have to address it now.

The first thing that people say who are not sophisticated about these models is, "oh, let's just freeze fees because that's clearly the problem." However, it turns out that freezing fees is the worst thing that you can do. The reason is that we return 1/3 of the fee income to financial aid and other sources of financial aid like Cal Grants scale according to the size of fees.

So the one strategy we cannot follow is to freeze fees because that will punish poor people.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that here at Berkeley, almost 60% of our African American students and 60% of our Chicano students are receiving Pell grants. That means they fall into this category of requiring the maximum financial aid. That also means that if we don't address this, we're going to do serious damage to the diversity of the student body. Again, ironically, in spite of popular perception, freezing fees will do tremendous damage to the African American and Chicano participation in higher education here at Berkeley. Quite remarkable.

Gibor Basri: And that would of course occur at a time when the state was being increasingly diverse in its population. So that would presumably then be cutting out a larger and larger fraction of the very people that the University is here to serve.

Chancellor Birgeneau: Now about two weeks ago Harvard's president, Drew Faust, came out with this remarkable announcement that they were going to extend their needs-based financial aid for families whose family income was up to $180,000. And that Yale a couple days later has followed suit. So far in our conversation we've focused on people whose family income is in the $20,000-$40,000 range. That is Pell grant eligible students, but from the numbers we just gave you it’s clear that the middle class are going to be increasingly challenged in their ability to attend a public university like Berkeley as opposed to an elite private. So I'd be really interested to hear any or all of your responses to this.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Well, from the operational perspective, I have to say that I was just outright jealous of Harvard and Yale when I heard of their remarkable offers that they are making to their students and their parents. One of the things too, as you mentioned, that really, I think a lot of folks forget to notice, is that public institutions have an extraordinary burden on their shoulder in terms of the quantity of the need. Where as Harvard and Yale have 7-8% of Pell grant recipients, we're closer to 31%. That's extraordinary.

We have 7,000 more students to package in financial aid at that particular level. The same holds true in the middle class, Chancellor Birgeneau. So, again, it is not so much a lack of willingness to follow suit, we wish we could. Its a matter of the ability to have the resources available to us in order to actually allow the same sort of packaging as the privates are now able to do with their rather large endowments.

Gibor Basri: The problem here is that we are a university that is basically Harvard's quality, so we basically have Harvard's costs but we don't have Harvard's endowment.

Chancellor Birgeneau: Not only that, with our student population, I believe that students who come here to Berkeley will learn things that they won't learn at Harvard because they're going to encounter a different student mix. In an era where intercultural confidence will be one of the most important personal characteristics to be a successful and contributing citizen in the United States, I actually believe that coming as a student to Berkeley will provide a better preparation for the real world than the education that one will get at an elite private institution.

Walter Robinson: We even use in our selection process those kinds of values for students who are not just interested in how the world is but how the world ought to be. And when you collaborate across so many different, diverse backgrounds you have the perfect lab for how the world ought to be. So it may sound like social engineering but I just think it’s a natural outgrowth of what happens when you get people from those kinds of diverse backgrounds looking at the same problem and coming up with a variety of different kinds of solutions together.

Chancellor Birgeneau: So, and I think Suzy made this point most emphatically, the reality is if we're going to address the issue of accessibility and specifically not only reduce the self help level for the poor but to reduce the burden for the middle class we simply must have new sources of financial aid.

So, one of the challenges that the committee I've been chairing for the system as a whole has been looking at is indeed this challenge of where can new resources come from and it’s clear that some of it, if not a significant part, is going to have to come from private rather than public sources and we already have some number of scholarships here at Berkeley and throughout the whole University of California system, but that's going to have to be enhanced tremendously in order for us to have the resources that we need.

so we have proposed that the state should put up the UC system as a whole $100 Million dollars a year, over the next ten years, which would then be matched by private donors. I believe that this is entirely feasible and this would create an endowment of $2 Billion, which would of course grow more rapidly than inflation and therefore would guarantee accessibility for the indefinite future. In fact, it could actually, ultimately, reduce the self help level if we have a good enough investment strategy.

At first you might say "$2 Billion is a crazy number" but I'd like to point out that just for Berkeley alone, if every single one of our graduates, all 420,000 of them, wrote out a check for $1,000 and mailed it in, we would then have an endowment of $420 Million dollars. That would actually solve the accessibility problem for Berkeley at least, forever. So a one time donation of $1,000 by every alumnus or alumna could actually solve this problem.

Now we're not expecting that to happen unfortunately but, it does demonstrate that this is not an impossible problem, that the problem of accessibility is solvable if private people will step up and help us to meet our responsibilities for the people of California. So, interested in your response to that, plus any other ideas you might have.

Gibor Basri: Well of course alumni giving is part of the way where Harvard got where it is, and in the past, you know, I think people have viewed the public university as something that the state supports and something they just go to and don't have any responsibility for future giving and that's just changed over time, partly driven by the private have alumni who do give and they've now gotten themselves into a situation where in order for us to maintain our own quality, you know, if our alumni appreciated going to Berkeley and appreciated the benefits of that, they're going to have to think of themselves a little bit more like private alumni in the future than they did in the past.

You know another thing that I think is a source of giving that we could probably hope to try to foster in the future is more corporate giving as well, by companies in California, because it’s those same companies who would like Berkeley graduates as their trained work force and I know we already have had conversations with a number of companies who've, you know, that's their interest.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: I agree with you Gibor. I mean, one of the things that's key in my mind in all of this is shared responsibility. Not everyone is blessed with children but, that doesn't mean you can't adopt the children of California to help.

Chancellor Birgeneau: That's great. I love that.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: It truly is everyone's responsibility to build a community that is thriving, that is rich, that's engaged and really following their passions and without that type of both corporate, civic, state individual responsibilities we're never goning get there, because the challenges of the 21st century are great. But that doesn't mean that we are not up to the task. I think it’s just a matter of rallying all of the resources available to us to make that happen.

Walter Robinson: The collaborative partnerships, you know, no individual entity seems to have the wherewithal to address this problem by itself and a diverse, well trained work force is definitely value added to the economy.

Chancellor Birgeneau: The important issue from my point of view is that we can't wait for 2017 and say "okay we have a problem let's address it." For example, building up an endowment, we have to start now. Even in this year of a budget crisis, we can't say "well let's wait until the budget gets better." Because the budget's never really better, right? The budget's always a challenge, there are always competing demands. So we have to decide now that this matters profoundly to us and we have to figure out how to move forward.

For last while we've been concentrating on the monetary aspects of access and affordability, I'd like to move over now to some other things that I know all of you work hard on, and you Walter in particular. Maybe you could talk about a little bit about outreach, comprehensive review, Yield and all the things that we have in place to support accessibility and success for low income students and further gaps, what can we do better, and what are we already doing well that we can just be proud of?

Walter Robinson: Well, when we talk about outreach I think its important that we break it down into three phases. The first phase would be the developmental outreach, of which we don't do a whole lot, but there's some that's going on.

Early outreach is something that we do quite well through the Center of Educational Partners the education opportunity. I'm sorry…

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Educational opportunity program? Upward bound?

Walter Robinson: Upward bound, trio programs. All designed to provide academic preparation and academic readiness for students who are from low income, first generation backgrounds. We're very proud of that work.  Then there's a variety of other programs that are going on within academic units. Biology scholars, I know that over in Engineering there's some outreach work that's being done, the Young Musicians program is another way through music getting students engaged in academic preparation and then there's immediate outreach and that's where my staff is very much engaged in going out to high schools and communities and trying to serve every region of the state.

It is our mission to make sure that we cover every county. The only county that we did not go to this year is Alpine County and we haven't been able to find a high school in Alpine County.

(group laughing)

Walter Robinson: So that's a very good reason.

Part of our mission also in our outreach efforts is to not just identify students where we can generate applications from those counties but, also offer a seat to students from every county in the state and we've managed to do that every year through our outreach efforts and also with just the way that we go about doing admissions review. You mentioned comprehensive review.
Core to comprehensive review is that we look at students in the context of opportunities that were made available to them. That way students at low resource schools and I like to say low resource schools instead of low performing schools because these students are performing in outstanding ways. They just happen to be in environments where there's not a great deal of resources available to them as is the case for students at higher resource schools. Those students who've excelled in those environments, those students who through their involvement with extra curricular activities have contributed to those communities, those students who might be in situations and circumstances where they just cannot contribute in traditional ways and volunteerism because they have family responsibilities and other obligations.

We're proud for the fact that we can look at those students in total, as a total individual. All 44,000 of those applicants last year were read at least once. Most were read twice and when I say read we look at everything in that application from cover to cove,r and that's how we come up with our contextual understanding of who these students are and what they may bring to the campus community.

We want to make sure that we leave no stones unturned as we go out and try to find students who represent the socioeconomic and geographical diversity of the state. So that's central to our admissions policy, to our outreach strategies and to our Yield events and that's the final thing I would like to mention.

It would be wonderful if we had a nice strong scholarship endowment where we can go to a student, no matter where they were from, because they were just superior students and say to you "not only are we offering you a seat to the campus but, we would also like to provide you with this type of support." We have been able to do that for a good number of students but there is a lot of students who will opt not to come to Berkeley because of financial circumstances. That is one of the most difficult conversations that I have to have as an admissions director who through one program or one means or another I get to meet a lot of these students and families and when they walk up to me at a Yield event and say I can't come to your school because this private university down the road offered me x amount of dollars and I just wanted to tell you I've always wanted to come to Berkeley, but its quite impractical for me to do that. Furthermore, my mom is standing here and told me I should take the money being offered at another school in that amount.

These are tough decisions for families because they know the value of an education, a degree at Berkeley. They know its more than a golden opportunity, what I like to call a golden bear opportunity and so Yield is where we try to impart that spirit and information that is a golden bear opportunity that we hope they can take advantage of.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: You know, Walter's point really does raise, in my mind another critical element of community and that's communication..

You know, my basic message always is financial aid is available to every student. It’s just a matter of the type of financial aid that a student ends up with, and that's true for middle class. I mean even high income individuals are eligible for, you know, unsubsidized loans if they so choose because they have a son or daughter at school.

So again, I think it’s the myth of a state institution being paid for by the state, whereas now the whole algorithm for financial support has changed in the last 10-15 years.

Gibor Basri: Well I think we also need to remember that the state has a lot of communities that are not used to college going. We have a lot of first generation college students. That means those students come from families that are unfamiliar with the whole scene. Not just financial aid but what happens at college and how do you best pursue it and how do you best stick with it and so on and so I think we have a broader mission to make better contact with those families, have better resources out in those communities, produce better networking for those people so they can find out what they need to find out, not just in the financial aid area but other areas of student life and how you go about getting to Berkeley in the first place, which is a process you have to start much earlier than your senior year in high school. So there's a lot that we need to do to further engage that segment of the state.

Walter Robinson: Trying to create a college going culture where it does not exist is very, very important.

Some of us came through life with kind of an invisible hand guiding us place to place and making sure we were where we were supposed to be at all the particular important benchmarks, and then there's some communities that need that deliberate hand that you can see will grab you by the shoulder and take you to this place and then take you to that place and expose you to the things that you need to be exposed to so you'll be ready to have an experience, a UC experience. It even takes more preparation to make sure that you're ready for the Berkeley experience because we believe that we can have academic excellence and diversity and that's always our goal  trying to have that balance of academic excellence and diversity. We can have both.

Chancellor Birgeneau: So this has just been a really a terrific conversation. Maybe I'll go around and any or each of you wants to make a sort of final comment, starting with Suzy.

Susanna Castillo-Robson: Well I'll just start off with advice that my mother gave me, who is 87 years old and her only regret in life is that she never went to college, and that is invest in yourself. If you're a student who's thinking about going to a school or college, do not sell yourself short because you will regret it for the rest of your life. You are making the best investment in yourself and that would mean your time, looking at your talent, identifying your passion and running with it and then also, once you are allowed in by a particular institution, and hopefully that will be Berkeley, that you will indeed look for resources and that we're here to help you identify resources to make that dream a reality.

Walter Robinson: I think students and parents just need to be courageous enough to meet the challenge of preparing for a first rate education. It is definitely worthwhile. I know in some communities it is not looked to be highly rewarding to be, you know, a computer nerd or someone interested in science or math. There's even some intimidation factors that come with that and that's why I just want to promote the importance of being courageous and stepping outside of the confines of maybe what might be the norm in your community and I'm speaking specifically in this case to the African American community since I'm a member of that community. I'm also a member of this great university. I would like to do whatever I can to send a positive message to challenge the myth that Berkeley is out of reach, that you need to have a 4.0 in order to get in, it helps but it is not absolutely necessary. We look for students who have gotten the most out of the circumstances that they live in and they exist in. So I would just encourage students to take a closer look at Berkeley and what we have to offer.

Gibor Basri: Well I'd like to piggyback off of that and just stay that it’s also not just their task but it’s our task and I hope that this conversation shows that we really have taken this on as a really primary task that we have here and I appreciate the Chancellor's help on this issue and I appreciate the opportunity that I have as a new position which is directly aimed at this issue: equity and inclusion. The fact that my position now exists shows how serious we are about this problem and I hope that we will be able to come up with more creative ways to help and I also hope that we'll be able to engage all the communities out there to get their ideas about how we can help, so that together we can make a big change in the way things are moving right now and keep our current excellence and diversity at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Chancellor Birgeneau: So I'll just finish where I began which is reminding people that we are a public institution and that ultimately both our obligation, but also our privilege, is to serve the people of California, but it’s important that we serve all of the people of California and to do that we're going to have to focus increasingly on accessibility and affordability for our undergraduates by whatever means that it takes in order for us to guarantee that. And good luck in the admissions cycle.

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