Education

Public College Spends $158k Of Public Money To Rebut Public Study

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Blake Neff Reporter
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The University of California, a public college, spent over $158,000 in an effort to improve its reputation online, all to counter a negative report put out by a separate public entity.

A March report by the California state auditor was damning for UC administrators, finding that over the past five years out-of-state enrollment had grown a whopping 82 percent, and international enrollment a staggering 214 percent, while in-state enrollment had actually declined by a small amount. The explanation for this shift, the audit argued, was the UC system’s desire to have more students paying out-of-state tuition (currently over $38,000 a year) rather than the smaller in-state figure (currently $13,400).

Not only did the UC system admit more out-of-state students, the audit found, but those students were declining in quality. While historically the expectation was that any out-of-state admission had to go to a student in the top half of the applicant pool, the audit found that UC admitted over 16,000 students who were substantially below-average for the campus they applied too, thereby denying spots at those campuses to in-state applicants of the same caliber.

UC officials didn’t deny they hiked out-of-state enrollment to improve their finances, but they have argued it was necessary to keep offering the same services and to subsidize the education of in-state residents. The audit rejected this claim, though, finding that UC kept increasing the amount it spent on staff salaries when it could have been holding steady or making cuts.

But UC administrators haven’t taken these accusations sitting down. Annoyed by accusations that they are wasting public funds, they have fired back by using $158,000 in public funds to improve the school’s reputation on the Internet. The money was used to put out positive messages about how the UC system was benefiting Californians, in order to deflect from the audit’s narrative of a school increasingly focused on outsiders and the dollars they can bring.

Ironically, this ad campaign means the University of California, a public entity, was spending money to counteract the findings of another public entity in the state.

“It’s completely infuriating to read for the second time that almost $200,000 was spent on changing UC’s reputation on the Internet,” University of California Student Association president Kevin Sabo told The Daily Californian. Sabo argued that the money would have been better directly improving the college experience for UC students, such as by hiring more sexual assault investigators.

A UC spokeswoman said no tuition or state money was used to pay for the ad campaign, and that the funds were instead taken from the school’s endowment earnings. But this explanation can only go so far. The fact that the school spent its endowment funds on a PR campaign means those funds were going unused for other purposes that state funds then had to be used for.

The spokeswoman also claimed the PR campaign was a “routine” purchase, but The Sacramento Bee claims that documents it obtained made it clear the buy was both exceptional and was made explicitly in response to the hostile state audit.

It’s not the first time the UC system has spent a six-figure some trying to improve its reputation, with mixed results. Earlier this year, it emerged that the University of California, Davis spent $175,000 in an effort to purge the Internet of references to a 2011 incident where a police officer pepper-sprayed protesting students.

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