The price of a two-year graduate journalism degree at UC Berkeley is set to rise to $46,600 for in-state students, a nearly 50-percent increase, and $71,450 for out-of-state students after months of impassioned debate among the school’s faculty, alumni, and students.
The first class of students to be affected will enter in 2015, though the additional annual fee of $7,500 will only kick in during their second year. Berkeley’s governing body approved the hike in late November after faculty voted on the amount in October. It will impact out-of-state students by $4,650 due to a separate tuition cost reduction that kicks in due to the new fee.
Dean of the journalism school Edward Wasserman, who joined Berkeley in 2013, described the fee as “unavoidable” in a memo announcing the approval. The school been in the red for several years, with a budget shortfall of $500,000 predicted to increase 60 percent in five years, he said in September. Aside from helping balance the books, the new fee will go toward career services and fundraising, as well as travel grants and technology upgrades.
Some faculty fear the pool of applicants will shrink, especially among prospective students without deep pockets.
“We had always resisted the fee for the simple reason that journalists don’t make very much money,” said Cynthia Gorney, a professor at the school. “Our biggest concern was for the working-class and middle-class students who make up a lot of our population who would not necessarily qualify for financial aid but would also not have family support to make the extra money.”
Gorney said the fee would affect Berkeley’s identity as a diverse, public school, with a relatively small intake of 40-50 graduate students per year, and fees traditionally cheaper than its competitors. Comparable one-year programs cost $69,300 at Northwestern University’s Medill School, $62,250 at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and $63,250 at Columbia Journalism School, which publishes CJR.
One-third of the new fee will go back to students in financial aid, which is mandated by the University of California system. Currently, 60 percent of J-school students receive aid, according to Assistant Dean Roia Ferrazares.
Wasserman’s initial fee proposal was $10,250, but the faculty voted it lower. A fee of $5,000 was proposed in 2010 under then-dean Neil Henry but was not supported by the staff. Public funding has only suffered since then, with Berkeley’s undergraduate program facing increases of up to 5 percent yearly.
“The endowment for a public university like Berkeley is supposed to be the taxpayers and the state legislature. That’s all been reversed,” said Lowell Bergman, who heads the school’s investigative reporting center. “Nobody wanted to have a fee increase on the faculty, period.”
Chris Ip is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisiptw.