U.C. system president on freezing tuition in wake of Covid-19 crisis
Yahoo Finance's Melody Hahm joined The Final Round to talk what the University of California system president is doing for students during the coronavirus pandemic.
Video Transcript
- So at this time of people going to school from home, a lot of people are questioning the value of that education, what they're spending, is it worth it, should they be getting money back? Melody Hahm, you just had an interview with the University of California's President, Janet Napolitano, on how they're thinking through some of these issues. What did she say?
MELODY HAHM: Yeah, and Jen, as you may be aware, the UC system actually has an operating budget of around $40 billion, and Janet Napolitano is overseeing 10 different schools, five different research labs. It's a huge conglomerate of sorts. Exactly a week ago, the UC system actually decided to freeze tuition but also decided to eliminate SAT scores as necessary as well as letter grades for certain required courses, as many high schools have actually transitioned to pass fail methods, just because it's so hard to determine what grade someone deserves if they're only on the computer, only completing assignments a couple hours a day. She had some interesting insights on the education system at large right now.
JANET NAPOLITANO: We're holding tuition steady. We are not increasing tuition for our current students and don't have plans to do that. But in the meantime, if students had to leave their housing and dining contracts we've allowed them to withdraw and given refunds for those, so. And then our financial aid offices are very busy working with students. Many of them have to have their financial aid packages recalculated, and of course, when the federal money for students starts to flow, and we know how that's supposed to work, that also needs to go into the calculation. And so we're going to try to do as much as we can for our students so they can remain at university, remain making progress toward their degrees.
MELODY HAHM: Napolitano did announce last year that she would be stepping down from this role in August of 2020. I did ask her in our interview if those plans have changed, and she had a long pause and said yes, perhaps, because of course the timing would pretty much be disastrous if she had to leave. Her original plans were to actually join UC Berkeley staff and faculty. So if you think about it, overall, this has created a huge ripple effect, and we saw some tone deaf comments even from the Dean of Tisch at NYU saying, no, no refunds, and she had that crazy music video.
So I think overall the communication level that folks are expecting from their educators after doling out tens of thousands of dollars is quite high. And one other comment she did say was she actually encourages people to be using sites like TikTok and be creating content to not let the crisis go to waste. So that's added pressure for some of these people who are trying to apply without having to depend on the typical metrics that are normally looked at.
- So interesting. Talking to parents of college students, they are really focused on the cost in what's happening, and then talking to the actual students, I've heard a lot of controversy over this whole pass fail stuff. Students feel like, well, I was doing well in that class. I want to get more than that, or some of them are happy, but it's just a fascinating topic here, and a great interview. Melody Hahm, out in California.
