Some on the Left Coast are miffed at the University of California-Berkeley's plan to start admitting additional out-of-state residents and international students -- who pay higher tuition than the in-state students -- to make up for state budget cuts.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau told the San Francisco Chronicle that his campus will be admitting as many as 600 fewer "unfunded" California students a year to offset a 20 percent cut in state funds. Those openings then will go to out-of-staters.

Currently, about 14 percent of the 13,000 freshmen who gain admission to Berkeley each year are non-residents. The newspaper reports that a task force of UC Berkeley faculty and administrators recently recommended pushing that number to 23.2 percent for the 2010 fall semester.

California State Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, told the newspaper that this move was "extremely frustrating" and added it was time for the university to stop blaming the state for all its problems. "All of us taxpayers thought we would have UC to educate our children," Yee said. "But more and more, it seems to take care of other individuals -- be it high-paid executives or out-of-state students."

Are you, too, outraged? Or is this something that simply makes good business sense?

Closer to home, nearly a quarter of all undergraduates on the UW-Madison campus already are paying out-of-state tuition.

According to 2008 figures, 24.3 percent of the 29,153 undergraduates at UW-Madison were paying non-resident tuition. That's very close to the 25 percent cap the UW System has for non-resident enrollment at any one institution.

Yet those numbers are a bit misleading. In fact, only 65 percent of the undergrads at UW-Madison in 2008 were actually residents of Wisconsin, while another 11 percent were Minnesota residents paying only slightly more than in-state tuition rates due to a reciprocity agreement between the states.

"Only UW-Madison comes anywhere close to the 25 percent cap on non-resident enrollment," UW System spokesman David Giroux said in an e-mail. "All other (UW System) institutions are way down in the single digits. We've made efforts in recent years to price our non-resident tuition more competitively, and that's led to some small gains in enrollment, which is good for our campuses in more ways than one. Non-resident students pay the full (unsubsidized) cost of their education plus a little more, effectively providing additional revenue to educate Wisconsin residents."

Added Giroux: "We'll continue marketing to non-residents, but I don't foresee any effort to raise the cap."

At UW-Madison, tuition and mandatory fees for resident undergraduates are $8,310 for the current academic year, while students from Minnesota pay $10,134. All other non-residents, meanwhile, pay $23,059 to attend UW-Madison.

The number of those paying non-resident tuition at UW-Madison has remained fairly steady over the years. A decade ago (1999), 20.9 percent of the students on the UW-Madison campus were paying non-resident tuition, and two decades ago (1989) it was 22.1 percent.

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