Republicans in the Legislature won the budget battle, hands down, and can crow among themselves and to their constituents that they held the line on taxes. But if they are being truly honest, they'll admit that they agreed -- in some ways insisted, with their reflexive resistance to new taxes almost anywhere else -- to tax college students to help bridge the budget gap. Some students may find the new tax, in the form of major tuition hikes, to be so onerous they are taxed right out of a degree.

Raising about $700 million annually for the treasury, the fee hikes erase amere fraction of the state's $38 billion budget deficit, a gap Gov. Gray Davis more sensibly sought to bridge by raising cigarette and sales taxes, and income taxes on high earners. But for students, the hikes will be steep. For those from middle class families that won't qualify for financial aid, they're potentially prohibitive.

Undergraduates in the University of California and California State University systems will see annual tuition costs go up 30 percent, on top of a 10 percent increase at CSU this past spring semester. A year's tuition at a UC campus will now cost $4,984, up from $3,834; at CSU, $2,046, up from $1,572. Graduate students, who pay higher tuition than undergraduates, will face similar increases. Per-class fees at the community colleges will rise from $11 to $18. The community colleges will be hardest hit, in part because unlike the other two systems, they don't even get to keep the increased fees on their campuses -- it all goes straight to the treasury.
At a time when enrollment demand is growing steadily, all three systems -- and especially the community colleges, the state's most efficient institutions for creating opportunity among the poor -- will be forced to turn students away for lack of certain classes and professors to teach them. The tuition hikes will push many students to shelve their college aspirations -- temporarily at best, permanently at worst. The bottom line is that California's decades-old promise of college access for all, once a source of national envy and an engine of economic advancement and opportunity, has officially been broken.

It would be overly generous to call a state budget held together by borrowing, Band-Aids and deferrals "balanced." But if anybody is tempted to call it that, they'll also have to acknowledge it is "balanced," at least in part, on the backs of college students whom we presumably hope will one day carry this state into amore prosperous future. If anybody is tempted to crow about that, let them be reminded who's paying.