Becky Pallack at the Star has been doing a good job on her Campus Correspondent blog highlighting the fact that undergrads at UA are facing a tuition and fee increase next year of nearly $2,000 (up from the nearly $550 tuition and fee increase they had this year and the $766 tacked-on “tuition surcharge”), but for some reason, this news has not made the printed paper, so folks may not know that they should be concerned.

I guess if you don’t mind going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt or if your parents are rich enough to foot the bill, you have no concern. But if, like a few students I know, you will have to drop out of school because you know carrying $17,000 in debt (see bottom of this post) is a really bad idea and you’re caught in the financial-aid middle of parents making too much money for you to qualify for grants or need-based scholarships but not enough money to pay for their mortgage, car payments, health care, job retraining, etc. and cover the rumored hike – you may want to pay attention. And, for goodness sake, launch a massive protest.

The president’s proposals for saving their universities via tuition increases are due to the Arizona Board of Regents this Friday and will be made public at noon here. According to Pallack’s blog here, here and most importantly here, tuition will be up to at least $9,000 in 2011-12, which, one may guess, means it might jump to $8,000 for next year. That doesn’t count the hundreds of dollars of fees or the “temporary” surcharge, which two of the best unpaid investigative reporters in town do a bang-up job of reporting on – and revealing the nasty little secrets about – at The Desert Lamp here and here, respectively.

The increase may actually be worse than rumors. According to an anonymous professor at one of Arizona’s universities, for every $200 in tuition increases, based on UA’s current number of students and a financial-aid mix I don’t fully understand, the UA gets about $4 million in revenue. Since the state cut nearly $100 million from its funding of UA in the past two years and UA says they’ve absorbed $40 million through mergers and program cuts (see UA organizational chart before the 2-year Transformation Process and after), that leaves about $60 million UA has to raise through additional revenue. Using the figures above, that means tuition would have to increase about $3,000 per student over the next 2 years, if enrollment stays static. Of course, UA assumes an increase in enrollment – but with a huge tuition hike and the job situation in the toilet, maybe they won’t see an enrollment increase. (And please, do not be impressed with the university presidents saying they will also increase financial aid when they hike tuition. Their definition of “financial aid” includes loans, which, as anyone paying on a mortgage will tell you, is debt, not aid. Grants and merit or need-based scholarships are aid – meaning help. Loans are “help” you have to pay for, with interest, for a long time after you graduate.)

Keep in mind that UA has increased tuition and fees more each year of the past decade. UA officials blame this on the state’s lack of funding, although one could rightly argue that building fancy rec centers, dorms and hiring a VP for Health Affairs at $650,000 (and adding all these financial perks) could also have something to do with it. Looking back a couple years, I reported that UA, which rightly states that its tuition is still at the top of the bottom one-third of tuitions among peer universities, nonetheless has tuition hikes that are higher than average in the nation. Keep in mind also, that UA stands alone among the three universities in not offering some version of a fixed tuition or guaranteed tuition plan for students already on campus.

So, worried yet? Angry? You should be – and not just at the legislature for hacking their support of education (which does indeed deserve some outrage). Maybe you should also be a little miffed that UA is making it look like they care about students by proposing to offering lower tuition for degrees off the main campus but ignoring the needs of the nearly 39,000 undergrads currently on campus by jacking up their tuition. How about asking the cadre of vice presidents/provosts making more than $200K to take a salary cut (or at least institute a salary freeze) so students will have a lower tuition hike.

My prediction for Friday’s proposals is this: NAU’s John Haeger, who was the first to design – and stick with – a four-year-guaranteed tuition plan, will be creative about keeping tuition low. Michael Crow up at ASU will come up with some wiz-bang proposal that stops just short of buying Bolivia and building a new campus there, but will still find a way to increase enrollment through increasing tuition less than UA and will stick with some version of his piloted fixed tuition program. And UA’s Robert N. Shelton, emboldened by his faculty and their unspoken-in-polite-company belief that UA is Arizona’s true research university, that NAU should handle all the “low-end” undergraduate programs and that ASU should be Arizona’s “outreach” university, will eloquently propose that UA hike their tuition to at least $7,800 with proposed fees of at least $500 annually. Neither he nor Crow will rescind the temporary tuition surcharge of last year; I’m not sure about Haeger. If the student regent – or anyone on the board of regents – has the guts to try to stop this, as happened last year, no doubt another all-night, behind-closed-doors meeting with result in a flip-flop and…. a tuition increase.

Students and the public will have one chance and one chance only to comment on the proposed hikes: at the Arizona Board of Regents annual tuition hearing, March 1 from 5 p.m. ‐7 p.m. Comments are heard on a first‐come, first‐served basis, rotating through the three universities and can be no more than 3-minutes long. There are three places at UA to access the hearings: the Harvill Building, Room 211 on the Main Campus; in the Public Meeting Room, Room 203 at the Sierra Vista Campus; and at the UA Science and Technology Park,Building 9040, Room 2270 . Final tuition and fees for next year will be set at the board’s March 11 meeting at UA – but no one can comment at the meeting (although you can hold signs of protest quietly).

The beginning of a happiness journey.

As promised, I’m going to blog my thoughts as I work my way through Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. I’m only through the first chapter, but I’ve already discovered my major problem where it comes to being happy: I am not really sure what makes me happy.

I know what brings me pleasure, and I can even point to moments of contentment, and the rush of uncovering something no other reporter knows and bringing it to light is freaking AMAZING … but are those things really happiness? I’ve passed on the wisdom before regarding the difference between happiness and pleasure (at least where moral issues are concerned), and if you ask 10 different people to define “happiness” you’d get 10 different answers, methinks. Hence the need for individual happiness projects; what rings my bells, may not ring yours. Yet, like folks who’ve said they know obscenity when they see it, Rubin says (and I agree) that we probably each know happiness when we see it. Problem is, at least for moi, I don’t pay close enough attention.

So, that’s the first step: Setting aside some time to think about what really TRULY makes me happy. And that thinking can make you a little crazy, Rubin writes. From the book:

“…as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously – and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. … I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.”

“The laws of happiness are as fixed as the laws of chemistry,” Rubin writes, but even if one isn’t making up the laws from scratch, one needs to wrestle with those laws in light of one’s particular circumstance to develop a happiness plan and then figure out steps to implement that plan in one’s life. Use the research – i.e. one of the most important elements to happiness is social bonds – and find a way to apply that to your life. Then, baby stepping it, add something else that is particular to your happiness and figure out a plan to get more of that in your life.

For instance, I now know that work is key to my happiness; life after the closure of the Citizen has taught me that. But since I’ve not found fulltime employment, I’ve found that if I treat my training as “work” it increases my happiness as if it were a job. Not perfect, but in the right direction.

One of the best parts of Rubin’s first chapter was her list of Secrets to Adulthood. (Some of the secrets in the book are not included in the online link above and so I mention them here: Bring a sweater; do good, feel good; and people actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts from their registry.) Another great insight was her discovery that one goal of her happiness project was “to prepare for adversity – to develop the self-discipline and the mental habits to deal with a bad thing when it happened.” She didn’t want to wait for a crisis to remake her life. I think that’s great advice, although, for me, being unemployed has turned out to be more of a crisis than I imagined, so I’m going to start where I am.

If you’re wondering just how happy you might be, you can take the Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire (you have to register online to take it), but keep in mind Rubin’s words: you don’t have to be unhappy to start a happiness project. You just have to want to make a change. And for me, for this week or so, I’m going to just focus on writing down the times I feel happy (and unhappy) and see if I can come up with a list of what makes me happy so I can move onto the next section of the book where resolutions are developed out of those happiness goals.

Hiking in Pima Canyon over Thanksgiving with family and friends

POSTSCRIPT: I just got back from riding seven miles on the Rillito River bike trail, something I’ve wanted to do ever since we moved to Tucson 10 years ago. I went with my rock-n-roll son, and at one point I heard myself say, “This is great, I’m so happy!” Upon reflection, I realized I am always happy when I’m enjoying outside exercise, if I’m with family or friends. So, that’s top of the aforementioned “What makes me happy” list: Exercising outside with family or friends.

Welcome to the first true God Blogging post of 2010. (An earlier brief post re: this doesn’t count.) It’s hard to believe an entire year has gone by since journalism as I knew it was blown to smithereens, via a business agreement between two media giants that resulted in Arizona’s oldest daily newspaper being replaced by this blog site cum citizen journalism venture. Like millions of other laid off workers in this country, I’m remaking myself at mid-life, plowing through a federally subsidized teacher certification program after finally accepting (most days) that there is Life After Journalism.

Which brings us to this blog. I neglected it in the latter months of 2009 because of an internal battle over my former identity (professional – read: paid – journalist) and my current writing options (unpaid blogging; barely-paid and unpredictable freelance reporting; better paid but sporadic and tedious PR writing). I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say I’ve come to an understanding with myself that, in spite of being unpaid, blogging aides my sanity while wrestling with school papers demanding MLA citations. This was the first insight I got when reading the just-published The Happiness Project, which author Gretchen Rubin defines as an approach to changing your life:

“First is the preparation stage, when you identify what brings you joy, satisfaction, and engagement, and also what brings you guilt, anger, boredom, and remorse. Second is the making of resolutions, when you identify the concrete actions that will boost your happiness. Then comes the interesting part: keeping your resolutions.”

I have yet to identify all might bring me joy, etc., or all that brings me guilt, etc., but I know that one joy builder is

Another joy builder is playing in the Flagstaff snow

blogging, so I’m resolving to do more of it, the short details of which you can read about here in the newly updated “About Me and God Blogging.”(Regular readers will recall that I tried to get a virtual Happiness Project group started last year but didn’t follow through. This year, I will blog my way through Gretchen’s book, which is a more reasonable goal for me considering my school requirements. I’m very much into setting reasonable goals this year.)

So, as promised in the “About” link, here’s some thoughts on God (and more) news of late: First, perhaps you heard that FOX News’ Brit Hume thinks Tiger Woods needs Jesus to stop philandering. I won’t add much to the cacophony, except to point you to Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s interesting take over at Beliefnet and then, for LOL religious disrespect all around, John Stewart’s video on it here. (Yes, I do believe God has a sense of humor.)

Second, if you are interested in contributing to charities who do good out in the world, consider adding GoodSearch to your browser. In a few minutes, you can add it to your toolbar and then every time you use it to search the Web, money is donated to a charity of your choice. FAQs are here, but it seems a fairly painless way to get someone else’s money directed to good works in what sometimes seems like a hostile, selfish world.

And speaking of good, way back in September, Washington Monthly came out with college rankings of a different sort: They ranked 258 national universities for the amount of “public good” they provided based on three categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). University of Arizona got an overall score of 51 out of 100, with a ranking of 160 (out of the 258) in Social Mobility, 18 (!) in research expenditures and 36 in the “faculty in national academies” area (both part of the “Research” category), and a ranking of 97 in the number of graduates who head off to the Peace Corps. ASU, by comparison, got an overall score of 33 out of 100 in the rankings. For full detail, check out the interactive rating scale here.

If you’re interested in what one of the major go-to religion sites has to say about the top religion stories of the decade (including the rise and fall of the Religious Right and the rise of the New Atheists), check out Beliefnet’s multimedia article on that here, written by a reporter from Religion News Service. There is a great “related features” page at the end of the slides/article.

Finally, there are a couple of changes in the sidebars of God Blogging (and more). I deleted the “What I’m Reading” because, seriously, who really cares? I’ve added a “Let Us Pray” because at least some of the people who read this blog practice prayer and I wanted to offer the option for those wanting to share prayer needs a place to do that locally. Send your requests via the “Contact Me” button over on the right sidebar. And please, if you don’t practice or believe in prayer, practice kindness and don’t harass those who do. As This American Muslim says in his bio, if you don’t like what you read, close the browser.

The other blog change is that I’ve winnowed out links listed under “Stalking,” deleting those that have died or haven’t been updated for two months, and I added a couple new ones. I don’t agree with what is written on all of them, but think they make for a well-rounded short list of faith and religion writers (this being, after all, primarily a God blog), so check them out if you’re so inclined.

The exceptions to “religion-blog-only” standard are three: Rubin’s Happiness Project; my personal blog about studying for teacher certification; and The Desert Lamp because the UA students who write it are intelligent, witty, ask questions about Arizona higher education that no one else appears to think of. For instance, check out this post noting that the “as nearly free as possible” chant re: state funding of education refers only to instruction, not the fancy-schmancy dorms and other accouterments University leaders

Our just-graduated mechanical engineer son (right) with one of his ME professors at NAU's December graduation ceremonies. No more tuition hikes for him, and our UA daughter has less than two years until graduation.

say they must have to attract students. Evan Lisull (he of chalking controversy) and co-blogger Conor Mendenhall follow the money and break it down for all to see. (They are damn good reporters, and neither is a j. major.) They should pair up with Arizona Board of Regents’ President Ernest Calderón in his look-see at UA/ASU athletics spending (and maybe ask why can’t UA’s estimated $2 million bowl take go to fund, oh, a break in yet another tuition hike?)

So, thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany! Talk w/ you tomorrow.