[Eds. Note: This is the final installment of a three part series, in which we check-in mid-year with the three men who head Long Beach’s educational institutions. This series also appears in our February print edition, available for free at more than 500 locations citywide. Click here to find a copy near you.]
He is, to say the least, a busy man.
F. King Alexander not only resides as President of Long Beach State, he meets often with that other President—the one that runs our nation—and the higher-ups in Sacramento. Sometimes he does this in the same week, as was his first week in February.
This, of course, does not make Alexander skirt around or shirk from the dire responsibilities at home. In fact, that is why he is so busy: he runs a university that received a staggering 83,000 applications alone during a year that could very easily be called one of the darkest in California’s educational history. We’ve watched a pattern of disinvestment overtake the state, with the percentage we spend given our per capita income on Kindergarten-through-College education dipping to that of the levels we spent in 1966.
“Despite [the pattern of disinvestment], there’s light at the end of the tunnel——particularly with the passage of Prop 30,” Alexander said comfortably. “There was enough concern, that the taxpayers overwhelming said, ‘We need to reinvest or we are going to pay the price.’”
That proposition——Governor Brown’s drastic tax initiative that passed by a 54% affirmative——was even more acknowledged in Long Beach, including a last minute endorsement from Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce President Randy Gordon at the State of Education.
“Long Beach community has great faith in all our public schools,” he continued. “And they passed it with 64%. It’s a tribute to Long Beach and their belief that we are doing things the right way under adverse circumstances.”
Long Beach——and slowly but surely California as a whole——is avoiding what Alexander calls “Florida syndrome,” where aged folk flocked to Florida and became more concerned about medical services and social security, eventually “voting out education.”
The light at the end of the tunnel, however, isn’t more money——after all, the CSU, though not facing the overwhelming $250 million trigger cut that would have been enacted, still faces a drastic deficit in funding even post-Prop 30. This includes a reimbursement of the tuition increase enacted last fall—a move that is entirely unheard of—that was written into the proposition and which the CSU had no say in. The giveback? Some $132 million.
“We were looking at each other, scratching our heads. ‘What do we do? Do we just hand out $500 Starbucks cards for the students?’” Alexander joked. “We had to repackage financial aid entirely [and gave back $9 million to CSULB students]. And I do not want people walking around, gloating that Prop 30 passed: ‘Yay, we have money.’ No. We don’t have A DIME.”
This repackaging was just one of many facets that the CSU overall, and Alexander at home here in Long Beach, had to face. This is not to say that restoration money isn’t in the pipeline, particularly given the Governor’s proposed budget. But this doesn’t negate the overwhelming austerity measures that the CSU——and particularly CSULB, given its enormous student population—have to undertake in order to keep education quality high with expenditures and costs low.
“It’s good and bad that even through these times, we are rated as a Best Value in the West [by U.S. News & Reports],” Alexander said. “It’s good because we have value. The bad part is that no parent or student or faculty member wants to hear, ‘Congratulations, you spend less on students than anyone else in the country!’”
Though being slightly facetious, it is here where perhaps Alexander and CSULB show its most massive showcase of strength. He points to Title 1 funding, provided by the feds for schools who have large portions of low-income or disadvantaged students, and asks why more of that money doesn’t shift into higher education.
President Obama addressed this very issue in his recent State of the Union address (two weeks after Alexander was in Washington to discuss it with him) when he said that in the next renewal of the Higher Education Act, “affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid.”
“It’s not like these kids suddenly lose their socio-economic status because they stepped onto our campus. Put money in the places that are doing the best with the least for the neediest—and that includes Long Beach State,” Alexander said. “If we don’t invest in these students who need us, they’re going to become tax liabilities in California—after all, we’ve seen how prison spending has gone in this state.
“We have to continue to fight but there has to be a degree of optimism to do so—otherwise we’ll quit.”
Previously: