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UC regents boost next year's student fees Assembly speaker's budget advice ignored -- administrators' pay raises move forward

- Tanya Schevitz, Todd Wallack, SF Chronicle Staff Writers

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Hours after the University of California Board of Regents voted Wednesday to impose steep fee increases on students, a regents' committee recommended that hundreds of top university administrators get pay raises.

The board, meeting at UC Berkeley, is expect to vote on the pay recommendations today.

The proposed "annual merit" salary increases, which were made public Wednesday evening after the regents' finance committee approved them in closed session, average about 3 percent. They cover hundreds of employees from UC President Robert Dynes, whose base salary would increase from $395,000 to $405,000, to campus chancellors, vice chancellors, deans and other executives.

Other key executives include Senior Vice President Joseph P. Mullinix, whose base salary will rise from $350,000 to $358,000, and Senior Vice President Bruce Darling, who goes from $269,000 to $275,700.

In a statement, UC officials say they will propose further increases for some of the same senior managers at the next regents meeting in January.

"Even with this year's merit increases, the salaries of many senior UC managers still significantly fall below market," according to the statement.

Union workers complained to the regents that they have gotten little or no raises in years and urged them to stop raising the pay of top administrators.

University spokesman Paul Schwartz said the 10-campus system is negotiating with its union employees and cannot award raises until agreements are reached.

Separately, the regents approved a proposal to gradually increase UC salaries for all employees over the next decade. A recent study by Mercer Consulting found that UC offers lower salaries than other prestigious universities, though UC pay is comparable when retirement and other benefits are factored in. However, the Mercer study did not include all forms of compensation used by UC, leaving it unclear whether UC employees are paid better or worse than the average pay of their counterparts elsewhere.

The regents also approved a plan to set broad salary ranges for various senior management positions in the future, rather than individually approving each person's pay, as they have traditionally done.

In approving the student fee increases Wednesday, the regents disregarded assurances from state Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez that the Legislature would likely allocate enough money to make the higher fees unnecessary.

On a 17-to-2 vote, the regents raised fees next school year by 8 percent for undergraduates, 10 percent for graduate students, and between 5 percent and 10 percent for professional school students. The fee increases are expected to generate $147.9 million for the university. Núñez, an ex-officio regent, said the state Legislative Analyst's Office had announced that the state is expected to have more money than it predicted when UC earlier reached an agreement with the governor to raise student fees each year. Núñez said imposing fee increases now would undermine his efforts to get the state to allocate more money to the university.

"It certainly ties our hands behind our back," Núñez said.

Nadeah Vali, a senator for the Associated Students of UC Davis, told the regents that students are being forced out of school because of the increasing fees.

"A UC education has become so inaccessible and unaffordable that more students have to take time off to work and save money, or students are being forced to become part-time students because they have to work so much," she said.

The regents were told by university staff that fee increases place most of the burden on higher-income students because the low-income students will get the increase covered by financial aid while middle-income students will pay only half of the increase.

Undergraduate students, who have seen fees nearly doubled from $3,859 to $6,802 over the last four years, will pay $7,294 next year.

E-mail the writers at: tschevitz@ and twallack@

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