Waning birth rate will increase stress on state

Birth-rate data just released by the California Department of Finance suggest Gov. Jerry Brown may be forced to proclaim a new statewide holiday for procreation. Faced with a shrinking population, Russia has already established its own regional holiday to encourage couples to take the day off to go make a baby — there is a special prize drawing for those proven successful exactly nine months later.

Like Russia, California’s birth rate/fertility has been below the minimum required for population replacement since 2007 — a trend predicted to continue for at least another 10 years. In 2013, there were actually fewer babies born than in any year since 1986 — nearly a 20 percent decline since the peak reached in the early 1990s.

Unfortunately, California has established welfare and public employee retirement programs with an expectation that a growing number of future citizens will be available to pick up the cost. But what if the birth-rate plunge means there won’t be enough taxpayers? Will future parents be able to pay for their local schools, parks and police services while being forced to pay for the state’s current $350 billion debt and unfunded future pension/health liabilities?

Although we have just 12 percent of the U.S. population, California has 33 percent of the nation’s welfare expenditures. And, nearly one third of the state’s residents already receive taxpayer funded medical care through Medi-Cal with about another 500,000 now becoming eligible with President Obama’s deferred action program for undocumented immigrants.

Social activism on campuses helped build this liberal safety net but colleges and other agencies are now fighting for any leftover crumbs in the state budget. Higher education has been forced to cover costs by increasing tuition and fees for students who are already overwhelmed with debt. College students deserve a full review to minimize the administrative bureaucracy that siphons off classroom funds. At California State University campuses, only half of their employees are faculty members — which are evenly divided between full and part-time instructors. By comparison, 93 percent of the non-teaching employees are full time.

Any review should also ask if CSU is effectively blocking access for new students by allowing students eligible for graduation to continue occupying classroom space. They enrolled 145,000 senior undergraduates in the fall of 2012 but only awarded diplomas to 82,000 of them in 2013. Should some students be pushed to graduate and move on?

Government agencies generally justify budget requests by predicting population growth. Not surprisingly, the University of California and California State University systems trumpeted stories of increasing demand when they received more than 940,000 applications in 2013. But there were only 166,521 high school graduates that year with the required UC/CSU courses. Eligible students, panicked by threats of limited admissions, obviously applied to multiple campuses. Longer term, the declining birth rate has already reduced enrollment in the K-12 schools that feed students into higher education.

President Obama’s recent proposal for a free community college education sounds as though it might decrease pressure for tuition increases in California — but it will not really be free. The federal government will simply borrow the tuition money from China and add it to the growing $18 trillion national debt which will be passed down to those kids for repayment.

California’s shrinking birth rate is effectively the “canary in the coal mine” as immigration will continue to drive any population growth. But we have already made promises to state employee unions, and welfare voters will never surrender their established entitlements.

Will new immigrants be able or willing to pay for those commitments? For fiscal survival, our government agencies including our universities should begin organizing to do more with less.