When talking about issues in EECS/DS courses at UC Berkeley, one topic always comes up: the budget. But how does budgeting actually work, and why isn’t it working for EECS?
How instructional funding works
At UC Berkeley, the money from tuition and the state is collected by central campus (the center) and then distributed to each college (the units). Currently, UC Berkeley provides funding for “temporary academic support” (GSIs, tutors, readers, and lecturers) through the office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. Each year, the EVCP distributes a certain amount of TAS funding to the units, which is then distributed to each department and used to hire course staff.
In the 2022–23 academic year, the EVCP allocated $61.5 million for TAS. While that might sound like a lot, it constitutes only 2–3% of the campus’s budget to fund every GSI, tutor, reader, and lecturer, who perform the vast majority of instruction at the university. In total, EVCP TAS represents about $71 per student credit hour to fund course staffs, according to John DeNero. However, the average cost of hiring a course staff is somewhere around $100–120 per student credit hour. Each department is responsible for making up the difference between those two numbers.
Departments can determine how exactly they want to make up the extra costs. One typical way is to use faculty salary savings: whenever faculty go on leave, their salaries are retained by the departments and can be used to cover the EVCP TAS gap. Other ways of making up the gap include professional degree programs and summer instruction.
Nearly every department on campus needs to contend with this reality. The reason that the issue is worse in EECS and Data Science is that we educate a very large number of students.
To demonstrate, here’s a graph of a highly simplified and hypothetical world. Displayed are course staff costs and EVCP TAS funding versus student credit hours (assuming $71 in TAS and $110 in costs per student credit hour). In this hypothetical world, the English department teaches about 20,000 student credit hours a year, and so the gap between course staff costs and EVCP funding is about $1 million per year. Faculty salary savings and other department funds are able to cover that gap. The EECS Department, however, teaches some 90,000 student credit hours; EVCP funding is higher, course staff costs are higher, and the gap is higher, at some $4 million per year. Because EECS does not have 4 times as many faculty as English, our faculty savings are not 4 times as much, and we end up scrambling to make up the gap.
The issue has been made worse due to the university’s failures to increase EVCP TAS funding to pay for the wages and benefits won after last year’s strike. Central campus has increased the allocation for TAS next year by $12 million even though the university agreed to give roughly $20 million in increased wages and benefits to ASEs. The gap between funding and costs will therefore only grow, and departments will be asked to find the money.
Fundamental issues
This gap between funding and costs is the immediate cause of the EECS staffing crisis. But it is not the underlying cause.
It might seem that large enrollments are to blame. But large courses, like those we have in EECS/DS, are actually more efficient to run than smaller courses on a per-student basis. At-scale instruction should cost less to run—that the EECS department is facing a huge deficit is an artificial crisis created by the fact that central campus funds only a fraction of the cost of running these courses.
Specifically, the funding structure requires departments to borrow funding from faculty salaries to fund ASEs. And while that works for most departments because the number of faculty generally scales with the number of students, it’s absurd to expect it to work well for every department. This system penalizes departments with a low faculty-to-student the most, even though these departments are the most in need for ASEs and lecturers to provide instruction.
While the university might not want to change its bureaucratic processes, it has made an obligation to the people of California to provide a high quality education to a large number of undergraduate students, and it has made an obligation to student workers to provide them with certain wages and benefits. The university can and must change its bureaucratic processes to meet those obligations. Instead, the university is doing everything it can do to mold its obligations to the bureaucracy: gutting the rights of student-workers, and gutting the education of students.
To learn about how the budget can be reallocated to prioritize instruction, please read our essay on the subject.