i wonder how this will affect public california universities

[frankdux]

...because i'm applying to two of them.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28319486/

[Minnesotan]

Get your guaranteed funding before it dries up.

The CGS should propose an admissions freeze any time there's a hiring freeze. It's time someone started protecting grad students.

[dans595]

I also am applying to three public California universities, one of which I currently attend. The impression I've gathered from the faculty is that it will be a tough year on admissions to California schools, especially public schools. (The three Universities I'm referring to, specifically, are Berkeley, LA, and SD.) Though one might say "Well obviously it will be tough!," hearing it from the horse's mouth is even more frightening.

In my case it doesn't really make a difference. I am applying to every program I can in California because my wife has a state license which is no good in other states. I applied to a few out of state programs that have plenty of money and are situated in low cost-of-living areas so that we can try to make up for the difference in income if necessary.

[rising_star]

Honestly, several other states and/or public universities already have hiring freezes. I know they're in place in Florida and Arizona already and have been for a while. The hiring freezes aren't what stops grad students from getting admitted with funding though, or at least they haven't in the past. The new issue is the budget shortfalls, which the hiring freezes are designed to help.

[Minnesotan]

Hiring freezes merely @#$% up the job market for the next two years, meaning anyone already in a PhD program could get screwed. I was talking to one newly minted PhD from my program, who said of the five interviews he had, four have called back already to say they were told to postpone the search. With the new year coming, I'm betting he hears the same from job #5 soon enough.

[zhukora]

I am an employee of a public California university, and I think it bears mentioning that although the state and public universities are certainly very closely knit organizations, the UC system and the Cal State system are actually discrete entities from the government. They receive a great deal of funding from the state government, but they have quite a bit more play than other public institutions when it comes to what they do with that funding once they have it. In other words, I am a university employee, but not necessarily an employee of the state--the governator's proclamations about what will happen to state employees do not directly affect me and my co-workers, or affect us only with modification by the university system and the university itself.

Technically there has been a hiring freeze in most public universities in CA since mid-April, and the universities have been trying to cut back on employee paid time since mid-summer, so the latest fiscal developments are not going to affect this much. Up until this point, the hiring freeze has mainly affected only administrative and support staff, with new faculty continuing to be hired as needs arise, and graduate employment continuing pretty much unchanged; it is my understanding that this will continue to be the case. However with the latest round of belt-tightening, it's becoming evident that university support staff simply can't sustain their workload if additional significant limitations are placed on them, so things are moving up the food chain. Right now (at least at the university I work at), the biggest cost cuts are occurring at the level of the operating budgets of individual departments (which is to say, the money they use to host colloquia, maintain classroom and administrative equipment, purchase department supplies, etc), and most drastically, at the level of upper management. Proposals have been put forward that all university Presidents, Chancellors, and various senior executives have their salaries frozen until further notice. I don't think these measures have been adopted yet, but I suspect that although things are certainly going to get tougher for admissions and grad funding as time goes on, given the direction of cuts to date, actual in-policy limitations on anything affecting grad students will happen only as a last resort (undergrads are a different story), and in practice, limitations will mainly occur as a side-effect of faculty having less research funding made available to them from other organizations, and central funding sources being given only moderate cuts.

The big problem is that without any kind of state budget in place currently, and without any concrete information about what will happen when the state runs out of cash, the universities don't know exactly how much shortfall they're going to have to compensate for. So far they have tried overcompensating rather than undercompensating, and are not currently in as bad a shape as they were afraid they would be back in April, but with the future as one big unknown, it's very unclear how things will look come February.

TL;DR Version--The Current Press Release: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/n ... icle/19282

[MacDuff]

zhukora: Thanks for this cogent debrief and the link to the UC press release. I wish you the best with your own position!