News

It’s all over but the spending.

The Riverside Arts Academy on the city’s Eastside will enjoy a renovated arts center for its young talent.

California’s 2022-23 budget includes $25 million to renovate the César Chávez Community Center inside Bobby Bonds Park, Inland Empire legislators and community leaders announced Friday, July 1.

Despite enrolling more low-income undergraduate students than any other University of California campus last year, UC Riverside is also the least-funded UC campus. 

UC Riverside gets $8,600 in state support for instruction of each student, well below the systemwide average of around $10,000. 

School at the movies might sound fun. At UC Riverside, it’s a frustrating symbol.

UCR’s lack of classroom space forces students to trek off campus and under a freeway to classes at a cinema in the University Village shopping center. It’s an example of what officials call a chronic and unjust funding disparity between UCR and other UC campuses.

Jordan Guillory, a UC Riverside junior, is never sure where his math class will meet. Sometimes, it’s outdoors. Other times, it’s an empty lecture hall. The class never received an assigned classroom as the Inland Empire campus grappled with a 4,450-seat shortfall in instructional space, the second-highest deficit in the University of California system.

California high school teachers will need to be prepared to teach ethnic studies in several years, but there’s debate over whether they will be.

Arguing that too many community college students are getting stuck in remedial classes, California lawmakers are pushing a new bill that would create stricter rules dictating when colleges are allowed to enroll students in those courses.

California is on track to remove any reason for its public university students to take out student loans.

Known as Middle Class Scholarship 2.0, the “debt-free” program is slated to receive its first infusion of money this summer: a cool $632 million that lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom promised in last year’s state budget that they said they’d fund this year. 

Assemblymember Jose Medina, D-Riverside, author of a bill to increase community college adjunct professors' teach loads, speaking on the Assembly floor in 2017.

Two bills designed to improve the working conditions of part-time community college professors were easily approved by the state Assembly Higher Education Committee on Tuesday, but questions remain as to whether they will become law.

Assemblyman Jose Medina, who chairs the Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education, recently announced he would not seek re-election in 2022.

Medina, a Riverside Democrat, was first elected in 2012 to represent the 61st district. Before entering the Legislature, he worked as a Spanish and Chicano studies teacher at Riverside’s Poly High School and taught history at San Bernardino Valley Community College.

Medina sat down with EdSource for an interview about his legislative career and what his priorities are for higher education funding in the year ahead.