UC President Mark Yudof had a simple message to deliver Friday morning when he testified before the state senate’s budget committee: If the legislature opts for an all-cuts budget to fill its remaining $15.4 billion deficit, “all bets are off” at the University of California.
If the $500 million cut already made to the university earlier this spring were to double to $1 billion under an all-cuts budget, Yudof said the 10-campus system would be put on a path that could lead to a midyear tuition increase next January, employee layoffs, program closures throughout the university and — ultimately — a doubling of tuition to $20,000 a year.
Yudof’s testimony Friday marked the first time he has publicly detailed what a $1 billion cut to the UC could look like. Gov. Jerry Brown had predicted in April that tuition could rise to $20,000 or $25,000 under an all-cuts plan, and Yudof told the committee that he had looked at tuition projections until he was “blue in the face” and agreed that Brown’s prediction is “not far off.”
“The thing we fear the most is an all-cuts budget,” Yudof told the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review, which brought its hearing to the offices of Microsoft in Mountain View to hear the testimony of education officials and Silicon Valley business leaders.
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