6 ms·

UC Santa Cruz asks professors to house students

43 points by prostoalex 8y ago

patient_zero 8y ago
My knee-jerk reaction: So a place that benefits from government guaranteed student loans and ever-higher tuition rates is asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board? The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans. However, that would come at a cost of the profits. How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.
- ASpring 8y ago
  >If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc. Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) I'm pretty sure there are plenty of employees at UC SC who are paid a hell of a lot less than professor-rank academics. Like cleaners, cooks, librarians, secretaries, security, maintenance staff.
  - MiddleEndian 8y ago
    Not that it matters in practice, but many if not all of them would be contacted out at most universities.
    - ASpring 8y ago
      If I understand the situation correctly, at the UCs most workers are not contracted out and are rather a unionized public workforce see AFSCME. "AFSCME Local 3299 is the University of California’s largest employee union, representing more than 24,000 employees at UC’s 10 campuses, five medical centers, numerous clinics, research laboratories and UC Hastings College of the Law." https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/ https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/
      - MiddleEndian 8y ago
        Fair enough
- philsnow 8y ago
  > asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board I would hope the question that the faculty is asking is: Has the UCSC administration agreed to take any students into their homes?
- dekhn 8y ago
  it's not easy to grow the UCSC campus like that. There was an aggressive 25 year plan where they anticipated a campus multiple times the current size but it's not realistic to expect the town to accomodate it. It would also be super-unpopular to extensively develop the existing campus.
- true_tuna 8y ago
  The students would pay rent.
twblalock 8y ago
With the tuition increases and the massive increase in housing costs, going to a public college in California costs several times what it did a few decades ago. It's a serious problem. However, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living together. It would only get worse. The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.
- ASpring 8y ago
  Absolutely agree with your points. Especially given some of the recent high profile settlements regarding sexual misconduct at UCSC these emails seem poorly thought out. > The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them. Within the UC, all the housing must be self-funded; it needs to make enough money from residential payments over its lifetime to cover construction/maintenance/services. With UCSC in the bay area, construction is incredibly expensive. This means that the campus literally cannot build affordable housing for students. They are currently building a 3000 space complex (currently held up by NIMBYism, but that's another topic) and the "cheapest" they can build for graduate students is around $1200 per month for a bedroom in a 4 bedroom apartment. Given that the graduate students are being paid ~$2000 a month this isn't a great situation. UCSC is really in a bad spot. Either the state needs to stop mandating blanket enrollment increases across all campuses or it needs to step in and force Santa Cruz to build.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mylampisawesome 8y ago
  Local residents’ objections to new housing often stymie new development, and Santa Cruz is running into the same problem. The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development, notes Curbed San Francisco. Not only funds, but it would require a shift in the attitude of the locals towards such buildings.
nikhizzle 8y ago
Big changes since I was there about a decade ago. I had a $1300 stipend as a CS PhD student, and rent for a modest studio on pacific avenue ate up about $750 of that. I was 2 blocks from the beach. Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In retrospect, I was getting a bargain. Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their package since then. I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the year.
- noobermin 8y ago
  What about this, as an immediate remedy, how about the state and the government (on some hypothetical day they care about this) incentivize sending students to other schools across the country, and then investing money into said schools to improve them?
  - ASpring 8y ago
    Or even just other UCs. Merced/Irvine/Riverside are not experiencing housing crises at this level. Sending more students to UC Santa Cruz is just irresponsible.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Possibly wildly unpopular opinion: Offer relocation to academic staff to other UCs and sell the UC Santa Cruz property to developers, upzoned, and reinvesting the proceeds into the UC school system. It increases housing available, and it's financially beneficial to UC (which could buy up land for student housing around its other campuses, insulting it from this occurring in the future). Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is invading your costal property.
      - noobermin 8y ago
        I think one thing that would help is to make sure the staff could still be affiliated with the more prestigious UC's so they can put that affiliation on articles. As asinine as that is, it would allow academics especially to be more willing to move.
ezxs 8y ago
Here is the crux of the matter (in mathematical terms): "university admitted about 7,000 students this year, up from 5,300 last year, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel." "The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development" So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might not go along with it. Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.
- Invictus0 8y ago
  They massively overadmitted, yes, but that wasn't the plan at all. Correctly identifying the matriculation rate is extremely difficult when most students are applying to 10-20 colleges, and of course only attending one. The obvious recourse would be to rescind admission for thousands of students, but the ill will generated by such an action would be extreme, as all the matriculants would have already lost the opportunity to attend the other colleges they were accepted to.
nostrademons 8y ago
Santa Cruz isn't really the Silicon Valley metro area - it's in a different county which frequently isn't considered part of the Bay Area, the commute is more like 45 minutes than the 30 quoted, and there's only one road over the mountains, so if there's an accident on Highway 17 (which happens frequently) you're looking at 3+ hours to get over the hill. I had one or two coworkers who tried to live in Santa Cruz and work in Mountain View, and they lasted about 1-2 months before they just got a place on the peninsula. It's more common as a weekend getaway for engineers who worked at a company that IPO'd. The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too. It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area. The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots, which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town. I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.
- llukas 8y ago
  If you can set up 1-2 days of WFH and you have flexible hours then commuting from SC to SV is just matter of choice. There are plenty of people that do it (at least in my bubble).
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Yep, I was going to mention how insignificant the commute is if you only do it once a week. I spent a number of years in the coastal communities around the area, mostly working from home or cafes for startups in either SF or SV/MTV. The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region. Edit: I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago: While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton (~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard, powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms. Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside. That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another 10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.
outside1234 8y ago
We should not be putting more and more UC students in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, LA, and other high cost areas. For the love of god, expand the campuses in Davis, Merced, etc.

43 points by prostoalex 8y ago

My knee-jerk reaction: So a place that benefits from government guaranteed student loans and ever-higher tuition rates is asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board? The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans. However, that would come at a cost of the profits. How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.

ASpring 8y ago
>If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc. Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
chrisseaton 8y ago
> the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) I'm pretty sure there are plenty of employees at UC SC who are paid a hell of a lot less than professor-rank academics. Like cleaners, cooks, librarians, secretaries, security, maintenance staff.
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  Not that it matters in practice, but many if not all of them would be contacted out at most universities.
  - ASpring 8y ago
    If I understand the situation correctly, at the UCs most workers are not contracted out and are rather a unionized public workforce see AFSCME. "AFSCME Local 3299 is the University of California’s largest employee union, representing more than 24,000 employees at UC’s 10 campuses, five medical centers, numerous clinics, research laboratories and UC Hastings College of the Law." https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/ https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/
    - MiddleEndian 8y ago
      Fair enough
philsnow 8y ago
> asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board I would hope the question that the faculty is asking is: Has the UCSC administration agreed to take any students into their homes?
dekhn 8y ago
it's not easy to grow the UCSC campus like that. There was an aggressive 25 year plan where they anticipated a campus multiple times the current size but it's not realistic to expect the town to accomodate it. It would also be super-unpopular to extensively develop the existing campus.
true_tuna 8y ago
The students would pay rent.

twblalock 8y ago

With the tuition increases and the massive increase in housing costs, going to a public college in California costs several times what it did a few decades ago. It's a serious problem. However, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living together. It would only get worse. The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.

ASpring 8y ago
Absolutely agree with your points. Especially given some of the recent high profile settlements regarding sexual misconduct at UCSC these emails seem poorly thought out. > The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them. Within the UC, all the housing must be self-funded; it needs to make enough money from residential payments over its lifetime to cover construction/maintenance/services. With UCSC in the bay area, construction is incredibly expensive. This means that the campus literally cannot build affordable housing for students. They are currently building a 3000 space complex (currently held up by NIMBYism, but that's another topic) and the "cheapest" they can build for graduate students is around $1200 per month for a bedroom in a 4 bedroom apartment. Given that the graduate students are being paid ~$2000 a month this isn't a great situation. UCSC is really in a bad spot. Either the state needs to stop mandating blanket enrollment increases across all campuses or it needs to step in and force Santa Cruz to build.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mylampisawesome 8y ago
Local residents’ objections to new housing often stymie new development, and Santa Cruz is running into the same problem. The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development, notes Curbed San Francisco. Not only funds, but it would require a shift in the attitude of the locals towards such buildings.

nikhizzle 8y ago

Big changes since I was there about a decade ago. I had a $1300 stipend as a CS PhD student, and rent for a modest studio on pacific avenue ate up about $750 of that. I was 2 blocks from the beach. Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In retrospect, I was getting a bargain. Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their package since then. I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the year.

noobermin 8y ago
What about this, as an immediate remedy, how about the state and the government (on some hypothetical day they care about this) incentivize sending students to other schools across the country, and then investing money into said schools to improve them?
- ASpring 8y ago
  Or even just other UCs. Merced/Irvine/Riverside are not experiencing housing crises at this level. Sending more students to UC Santa Cruz is just irresponsible.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Possibly wildly unpopular opinion: Offer relocation to academic staff to other UCs and sell the UC Santa Cruz property to developers, upzoned, and reinvesting the proceeds into the UC school system. It increases housing available, and it's financially beneficial to UC (which could buy up land for student housing around its other campuses, insulting it from this occurring in the future). Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is invading your costal property.
    - noobermin 8y ago
      I think one thing that would help is to make sure the staff could still be affiliated with the more prestigious UC's so they can put that affiliation on articles. As asinine as that is, it would allow academics especially to be more willing to move.

ezxs 8y ago

Here is the crux of the matter (in mathematical terms): "university admitted about 7,000 students this year, up from 5,300 last year, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel." "The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development" So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might not go along with it. Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.

Invictus0 8y ago
They massively overadmitted, yes, but that wasn't the plan at all. Correctly identifying the matriculation rate is extremely difficult when most students are applying to 10-20 colleges, and of course only attending one. The obvious recourse would be to rescind admission for thousands of students, but the ill will generated by such an action would be extreme, as all the matriculants would have already lost the opportunity to attend the other colleges they were accepted to.

nostrademons 8y ago

Santa Cruz isn't really the Silicon Valley metro area - it's in a different county which frequently isn't considered part of the Bay Area, the commute is more like 45 minutes than the 30 quoted, and there's only one road over the mountains, so if there's an accident on Highway 17 (which happens frequently) you're looking at 3+ hours to get over the hill. I had one or two coworkers who tried to live in Santa Cruz and work in Mountain View, and they lasted about 1-2 months before they just got a place on the peninsula. It's more common as a weekend getaway for engineers who worked at a company that IPO'd. The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too. It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area. The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots, which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town. I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.

llukas 8y ago
If you can set up 1-2 days of WFH and you have flexible hours then commuting from SC to SV is just matter of choice. There are plenty of people that do it (at least in my bubble).
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  Yep, I was going to mention how insignificant the commute is if you only do it once a week. I spent a number of years in the coastal communities around the area, mostly working from home or cafes for startups in either SF or SV/MTV. The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region. Edit: I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago: While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton (~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard, powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms. Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside. That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another 10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.

outside1234 8y ago

We should not be putting more and more UC students in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, LA, and other high cost areas. For the love of god, expand the campuses in Davis, Merced, etc.