Demographics, Not Ideology, Driving UC Student Increase
In a March 27 letter, John Jaeger accuses the University of California, Irvine of greed for admitting increasing numbers of new freshmen for fall, 2001: “The only conceivable reason such students are accepted is the greed of the profoundly liberal academia.” He also favors “a dramatic decline in college enrollment, not an increase.”
Contrary to Mr. Jaeger’s assertion, UCI is increasing its enrollments in response to the growth of the college-age population in our state, so that the University of California’s commitment to the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education may be sustained. The University of California will need to increase its general-campus enrollments by 63,000 full-time-equivalent students between 1998-99 and 2010-11. UCI is pleased to be contributing its share to this expansion.
Mr. Jaeger also asserts that “as the number of students increases dramatically, so too do the number of remedial classes for UCI freshmen, in both math and English.”
Not so. A 33% growth in new freshmen between fall 1997 and fall 1999 has been accompanied by a diminishing proportion of students placed in preparatory classes in mathematics and English. While these classes contain some remedial elements, they are inaccurately characterized by Mr. Jaeger’s phrase “dumbbell English and math.”
Finally, UCI is pleased to report that the phenomenal growth of our freshmen classes in the past three years has been accompanied by a 39-point increase in the mean SAT scores of our new freshmen.
Meredith Lee
Dean
Division of Undergraduate Education
University of California, Irvine
Toll Roads, Cont’d
Robert Poole’s April 3 Viewpoint says toll roads “can make sense.”
However, he wrote 13 paragraphs on how that phrase relates to the investors, and four sentences casually justifying that California residents need the concept. Infrastructure and associated costs to the users deserve much more than such a cavalier treatment.
Poole, it appears, has been stricken with that horrid “eastern disease” that advocates littering the landscape with tollbooths, dropping airports in the middle of heavily populated areas and planting masses of high-density living units. He and his ilk (George, three OC supervisors, et al.) will not be happy until Orange County feels more like Newark and the Jersey Turnpike. Many Californians moved here to escape that mentality.
California’s tax-base has been and will continue to soar, so shouldn’t we be talking more about the best use of the transportation dollars that we are already shelling out and whether or not tollbooths “make sense” for Orange County residents ?
Dave Mulnard
Tustin
Bill Threatens to Raise Health Costs
Last year, after months of discussion among stakeholders on all sides of the healthcare reform debate, legislation to expand consumers’ ability to sue health plans was signed into law. A key concern in crafting that measure was to ensure that it would protect consumers without causing healthcare costs to increase and access to care to decrease. Whether that was achieved remains to be seen. Nevertheless, we are now faced with a new legislative proposal that would be best described as reckless in its lack of concern with increasing healthcare costs and the growing number of uninsured Californians.
Assembly Bill 1751 (Kuehl) seeks to prohibit arbitration agreements between consumers and their health plans. Supporters of the bill claim that consumers are deprived of legal “rights” by entering into these agreements, yet arbitration has long been embraced as a legal, cost-effective, and efficient method to resolve disputes between consumers and vendors, and between employers and employees. Use of a neutral arbitrator allows parties to come to resolve differences without having to enter into time-consuming, expensive trials.
Eliminating healthcare arbitration agreements would throw a costly wrench into a system that has worked well for years and continues to be improved. Far from depriving consumers, arbitration agreements actually protect those who cannot afford to hire an attorney to represent them in small disputes, the kind a trial lawyer will less likely take on a contingency fee basis.
AB 1751 would force health plans to recoup lawsuit and settlement costs through higher premiums. California small businesses would face higher costs in covering their employees. Some would be forced to drop coverage altogether. We already have 7 million Californians without healthcare coverage. Do we really want to add to those ranks?
Jeff Sievers
Civil Justice Association of California
Sacramento
