CSU Board of Trustees approves 6% annual tuition hikes over next 5 years
California State University students will have to pay higher tuition starting next fall.
The CSU’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved a controversial plan on Wednesday, Sept. 13, to increase student tuition by 6% annually for five years — a move the institution says is necessary to stabilize its budget and pay for its high quality academic and student services.
Students, faculty and other groups, though, decried the plan on numerous occasions leading up to the board’s Wednesday decision, most recently with a protest outside the Office of the Chancellor in Long Beach one day ahead of the vote. Opponents cited concerns that the increased cost of education would limit access to what has historically been the state’s most affordable higher education system.
But despite the pushback, CSU officials have repeatedly defended the five-year tuition increase proposal as an unfortunate, but necessary, action to pay for a nearly $1.5 billion funding gap.
“We face a difficult decision today,” Trustee Jack McGory said. “Its tough to do this and we don’t like it, especially when we’re so proud our affordability — but we’ve got to make these numbers work and do something long-term that continues the quality of education we have.”
The university system currently only has funding to pay for about 85% of the actual costs of education, institutional and academic support, and student services for its more than 460,000 students across 23 campuses, according to a CSU workgroup report released in May.
That’s largely because its own budget only has two sources of revenue: Tuition and funding allocations from the state budget.
About 60% of the CSU’s operating budget is funded by the state, while the remaining 40% comes from tuition revenue — the latter of which hasn’t been increased since the 2011-12 academic year, when the Board of Trustees approved a 5% tuition hike.
State funding has also failed to adequately align with the high costs of operating the nation’s largest state university system, according to the May report, and even with a 5% annual funding boost from the state budget approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the CSU still can’t cover the massive funding gap.
“We pay our bills every year, but we just never have sufficient revenues to pay for what we need to do every year,” Trustee Julia Lopez said. “And there’s opportunity cost — something that should have been done doesn’t get done. We as a board know we need to do something different.”
The additional money expected to be generated by the increased cost of attendance, CSU officials said, will allow the system to provide students with the level of education and academic support they’ve repeatedly asked the system to provide.
The CSU also needs the extra money to remain in compliance with federal and state mandates, including about $18.7 million to institute Title IX regulations, another $5.8 billion to upgrade decades-old campus facilities that have fallen into despair because of deferred maintenance, and another up to $1 billion for employee raises.
“If one or more of the revenue sources does not come to pass,” the CSU’s vice chancellor for budget, Ryan Storm, said Wednesday, “there will be significant and perhaps very difficult trade offs.”
Though the board considered an amendment to shorten the lifespan of the tuition proposal from five to three years, all of the trustees ultimately voted against that change, citing concerns that the revenue from three years alone wouldn’t be enough to help stabilize the CSU’s financial footing.
The tuition increase is expected to generate about $860 million over its first five years.
The board’s Wednesday approval of the plan will require the trustees to review and re-approve any additional increases after the first five years and the chancellor’s office will be responsible for assessing the tuition increases at the close of the five years.
Those changes were added to the proposal after the Committee on Finance requested them alongside their approval of the plan in July.
That assessment, according to a CSU staff report, will get underway in July 2027 for a report back to the board the following January.
At the minimum, the staff report said, the assessment will include tuition rate comparisons, student financial assistance by demographics, student debt burden, information about student achievement and generated revenue.
“This timeline would provide the (board) with the opportunity to consider during the spring and summer of 2028,” the report said, “changes to rates for the 2029-30 academic year.”
At least one trustee on Wednesday asked his colleagues to postpone approving the new tuition policy, a guiding document that lays out the CSU’s implementation of tuition and other student fees, which was a separate agenda item than the actual tuition increase plan itself.
“I would like to see us put off a vote on the policy today and have a chance to really think more,” Trustee Douglas Faigin said. “(That) might make a better policy that would address some of these other issues.”
But Faigin’s motion was denied by the other trustees, who argued that the document had been thoroughly fleshed out by CSU staff over the past several months — and that the tuition policy could always be amended in the future.
“I think the beauty of all the thought that has gone into this policy is it allows me to feel very comfortable in considering the tuition proposal today,” Trustee Leslie Gilbert-Lurie said. “We are clear that quality and affordability are at the forefront and the thought that went into the policy informed a really good tuition proposal.”
Ex-officio Trustee and California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, though, cited concerns that the CSU had not done enough research or data collection to get a full picture of how the 5% annual increases would impact actually impact students in the long run.
“I truly believe that you are headed into an action you don’t fully understand,” Kounalakis said Wednesday. “We know anecdotally that students are going to drop out; that a lot of students are going to have more years added on to their timeline to be able to graduate — we have some indications this will happen on a large scale.”
Kounalakis, who did not vote on the proposal, asked the coard delay the vote until the CSU’s newly appointed chancellor, Mildred García, can be fully involved in the process.
Garcia is slated to take the helm Oct. 1.
“Wait until the newly appointed chancellor of the CSU system can get here,” Kounalakis said, “and truly do her job — which is to understand what the largest decision that the CSU has taken up in 10 years will do to the system as a whole.”
Though there was only a small crowd at Wednesday’s board meeting, hundreds of students, faculty and staff protested the proposal outside the chancellor’s office on Tuesday, Sept. 12, the first day of the trustees’ meeting schedule.
Attendees at the gathering argued that students are already struggling to make ends meet with the current tuition costs — noting that many have to work multiple jobs on top of taking classes to cover the costs of their basic necessities.
“So many of the migrant youth that we work with are already hesitant to pursue their education because for them, what is primary is being able to work and support their families and themselves,” Matthew Dumanig, prime organizer for the Kabataan Alliance, said during Tuesday’s protest. “This tuition (hike) is an attack not just on students but especially on working-class students.”
Others said the higher price tag could prevent students from even pursuing education, especially those who don’t qualify for large sums of financial aid but aren’t able to pay for the cost of education out of pocket.
But the CSU has repeatedly said that the majority of its students won’t be impacted by the change, as they already receive reduced or free tuition. About 60% of students, Storm said, had their tuition fully covered by non-loan financial aid, while another 18% had partial tuition coverage, 4% got student loans and another 18% didn’t apply for aid.
About $280 million of new anticipated revenue over the next five years — or around one-third — would also fund financial aid for students with the most need, according to the CSU.
The remainder of the additional revenue expected to be generated by the tuition increases, meanwhile, would be used to expand the work of the CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025 — which aims to increase graduation rates for first-time and transfer students — alongside other student access, enrollment and basic needs services.
The first tuition increase will add about $342 to the cost of undergraduate tuition starting in the fall 2024 semester, for a total of about $6,084, not including the cost of housing, food, academic supplies and other basic necessities.
By the spring 2029 semester, full-time undergrads will be required to pay $7,682 for the academic year, while higher-level programs, such as a doctorate in public health, will total about $25,000 per year.
After that, the total cost of attendance will remain at the 2028-29 level unless the board decides to consider another tuition increase proposal.