From 1980 to 2014, California cut state cut funding to the tune of 54% per University of California student and 41% per California State University student, and in-state tuition costs have nearly tripled for students in both systems since 1991. In a December report, the University of California’s Global Food Initiative found that 44% of undergraduate students had reported experiencing food insecurity, and 5% of both U.C. undergraduate and graduate student populations reported having experienced homelessness at some point during their enrollment.
To compensate, students are borrowing more and more money to attend school. Now, an estimated 44 million American borrowers have racked up more than $1.48 trillion in student loan debt.
It was in this thick stew of newly-prohibitive tuition costs, ballooning national debt and heightened anxiety for working-class students that Rise was born in California. A student-led advocacy group founded by 28-year-old Maxwell Lubin, Rise seeks to eliminate college tuition wholesale, protecting students from taking on debilitating debt and encouraging the state of California to invest in its public colleges and universities in the process.
By Lubin’s estimate, more than 10,000 students across California are now directly involved in Rise’s advocacy efforts: signing petitions, phoning their legislators and traveling to Sacramento by bus to personally tell lawmakers their stories of financial anxiety in the hopes of staving off future tuition hikes.
And, according to Lubin, it’s working. In the fall, the group lobbied for and helped successfully pass Assembly Bill 19, a law that makes the first year of community college free in California and which will help an estimated 20,000 students go to college this year. And in January, the tuition increases slated for the Cal State and U.C. systems later in the year, due to insufficient state funding, were taken off the table after students showed up en masse to balk at the increased burden it would place on them.
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