The university bargaining team has repeatedly claimed that the university simply is not able to provide enough resources to fund instruction in EECS/DS. Let’s take a look at their budget and see what we can find.
The funding gap
University administrators are digging their heels at the cost of instruction—despite the fact that they have already agreed to pay certain wages and benefits under our current union contract. To help the university pay for instruction, ASEs have taken the unprecedented move of offering to take lower wages and remissions than are guaranteed under the contract.
Under the union contract, the annual gap between what the university is currently willing to pay ($13.3 million) and what the departments need to provide a high quality education to their students ($21.7 million) is $8.4 million. Because of EECS/DS ASEs’ willingness to take lower wages and remissions than are guaranteed under the contract, that gap has shrunk to just $4.3 million. It is the university’s turn to make up the difference by funding instruction.
For comparison, here are a few other things the university spends money on and how many years of the instructional funding gap they could cover:
| Project | Cost | EECS/DS equivalent |
| Football Coach Justin Wilcox | $4.75 million (per year) | 1 year of funding gap |
| UC President’s official mansion | $6.5 million | 1 year of funding gap |
| Berkeley Chancellors and Vice Chancellors | $58.7 million (per year) | 14 years of funding gap |
| UCPath | $942 million | 219 years of funding gap |
As a reminder, this funding gap is the difference between a world-class education and awful instructional conditions for the 25% of UC Berkeley undergraduates who graduate from EECS/DS every year. Finding the money for this in UC Berkeley’s 3 billion dollar budget should not be difficult—all it takes is 0.1% to literally save EECS/DS.
Little love for instructional support
The broader issue at UC Berkeley is that instruction is not a priority. At the end of the day, the university centrally allocates only $61.5 million per year for every GSI, tutor, reader, and lecturer—collectively called temporary academic staff, or TAS. That’s only 2–3% of the entire budget to fund the vast, vast majority of instructional hours at this university.
In response to the wages and benefits won after last year’s strike, central campus has increased the allocation for all TAS next year by $12 million. That may sound like a lot, but the university agreed to give roughly $20 million in increased wages and benefits to ASEs next year, so an increase of $12 million is wholly insufficient to cover the gap.
We recognize that the university has to prioritize certain things. But it too often feels like instructors and instruction are prioritized last. As student workers on the front lines try to teach more students with less, university administrators get enormous raises, extravagant capital projects are announced, and the cost of administration ever increases:
Here are a few illustrative examples of how administrative costs at UC Berkeley have changed over the last 10 years.
Cost of UC Berkeley administration, 2010–11 vs. 2020–21
| Line item | 2010–11 | 2020–21 |
| Chancellors and Vice Chancellors | $27.4 million | $58.7 million |
| Institution Support – Other General Administration | $16.3 million | $63.4 million |
| Academic Administration | $33.3 million | $47.9 million |
We should acknowledge that this data is limited in what it can capture. The university does not provide highly itemized, transparent data on how every dollar is spent, and surely some amount of administration is important. But we are also missing a significant amount of administrative costs from the picture here.
The increase in administrative costs illustrates that the university has been able to find the money to increase funding for its priorities, even while support from the state has been cut. Were the university to make teaching a priority, it would be able to find the money for it just as it did for the administration.
If this university prioritized instruction, the instructors that perform the vast majority of instruction at the university would be allocated the most funding. Instead, we see the university allocating about as much money for every GSI, tutor, reader, and lecturer as it does for the Chancellor’s and Vice Chancellors’ offices.
If this university prioritized instruction, teaching would always be the first thing to be funded and the last thing to be cut. Instead, we see the university threatening to cut TA positions in EECS/DS by anywhere from 63% to 83%—despite the fact that UC Berkeley’s CFO said that layoffs would not be necessary.
Money can be reallocated
The university doesn’t just have the money to fund instruction—it also has the ability to move that money to fund its priorities. We know this is the case because it has repeatedly done this in the past.
When the department started hiring 8-hour TAs to deny them fee remission, it did so for budgetary reasons. However, after a grievance, they found the money to remit TAs what they were owed—some $9 million worth of damages.
Back in 2016, UC Berkeley was running a $150 million budget deficit every year. In just two years, they balanced the budget.
When UC Berkeley needed to build a new building for the college of CDSS, they found the money. An anonymous donor donated some $252 million to fund it.
Earlier this year, UC San Diego chancellor Pradeep Khosla “needed” a $500,000 raise. In just a matter of months, the university raised $13 million to fund it.
At every contract negotiation in the past 20 years, UC negotiators have said that they could not afford ASE raises. Every time, ASEs won raises, the university found the money, and the university continued to grow and improve.
The money can and must be found: our courses depend on it.
To learn more about the budget and why it isn’t working for EECS/DS, please read our explainer on the subject.