Day 44

The Governor of California and his legislature are each at all-time low approval ratings; their ratings are in the tank. I wonder if Schwarzenegger again, like with the votes of no confidence against Yudoff, and UC protests at every campus on September 24, will say that these polls are just a bunch of eccentric loud mouths ranting and raving over nothing (I'm paraphrasing), and that he doesn't take it too seriously.

A headline on today's cover of the student newspaper reads: "Middle-Income Students Struggle to Make Ends Meet." The article goes on to give examples of students whose family household incomes are above $60K (the arbitrary line in the sand the university has drawn between people who can afford to send their children to college, and those who cannot), but who are still struggling to afford Berkeley. This situation will most definitely only become worse as fees spike over the next year. I've also heard and read about how this will negatively impact our efforts to recruit, enroll, and fund minority students, something that UC has been miraculously successful at despite Prop 209, which outlaws making hiring/admissions decisions based on race (and a few other demographic factors). Frankly, I think that UC has pretty much ignored that law by finding nuanced ways to work around it, hence the success. For example, we do not make admissions decisions based on race, but we take race into consideration when making final admissions decisions. Hey, you've got to do what you've got to do when the man tries to keep you down, know what I mean? Either way, the university is going to have a very tough time convincing low-income parents (an unfairly defined term, in many ways) that a UC education is worth the money, especially when said family cannot afford it, or if it involves student loans.

Remember a while back, I referred to a Sign of the Apocalypse? Here's another one: An annual volunteer day for Berkeley students had to be cut back due to decreased funding. The economy is so bad, that we can no longer even afford to work for free.