President James B. Milliken’s opening remarks at the UC Board of Regents January Meeting on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, as delivered
Thank you, Chair Reilly.
At our last Regents meeting, I outlined three issues guiding my first seven months at the University of California. First, access and affordability; second, protecting our research enterprise; and third, UC’s responsible leadership in AI.
Getting each of these right is essential for UC’s future. But it’s also essential to rebuilding public confidence in higher education — a topic that has been on my mind for the last several years.
There are a number of structural issues that have made higher education vulnerable to criticism. Recently, I introduced Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber at UC Berkeley’s prestigious Clark Kerr Lecture, and he outlined some of those criticisms.
One of his points on accessibility and affordability points — over the last several decades, competition for students has intensified, as a small group of universities have become far more selective and better resourced. It’s turned college admission into a high-stakes process that fuels anxiety and resentment about access and fairness.
As the leading public university in the world, UC is especially well positioned to row in the other direction, toward access and excellence, and away from exclusion. And we have done that. But we need to row harder.
We need to expand the opportunity for more students to earn a UC degree — but that is not the end. A great education is the goal. A great career is the goal.
We need to help more Californians see a UC education as both attainable and transformative.
One way we can do this is through initiatives like our Transfer Pathways and Transfer Admissions Guarantee, which provide greater clarity and help community college students prepare to transfer to the University of California.
Providing transfer opportunities has long been an essential element of California’s renowned higher education system, but we have more work to do on this front.
Expanding access is not just about the opportunity for more students to get into UC — it’s about getting graduates to stay connected with UC: building life-long relationships between our institutions and our students. Life-long learning used to be talked about as a kind of vague, desirable pursuit. Like a hobby. Today, it is an imperative.
No four-year degree can fully prepare someone for a 40- or 50-year career — especially in a world changing as fast as ours.
As our graduates need to learn and retool and reskill throughout their careers, I want them to look to their alma mater. They should be able to rely on UC to provide high-quality, relevant, easily accessible education for life. It’s not a four- or five-year purchase, it’s a lifetime subscription.
At the same time, it must be affordable. One way we advance this today is through the Tuition Stability Plan, a cohort-tuition model where students know that the tuition rate they enter with will remain the same throughout their time at UC.
As Chair Reilly mentioned, however, affordability goes far beyond tuition and fees. For many students and families, the real challenge lies in the broader costs of attendance — in housing, food, transportation, health care, and other expenses we have less control over that continue to rise.
We need to further strengthen our financial aid program and support for basic needs initiatives — to ensure that a UC education remains within reach for all Californians. Much of what we do will be transformed, advanced, disrupted — choose your verb — by rapidly changing information technology. I believe it will provide dramatic ways to expand our reach and lower costs. I believe the University of California needs to lead this work.
At a time when confidence in higher education is being tested, our response cannot simply be to defend what we have done in the past.
We must demonstrate how excellence and access go hand in hand. We must ensure that a UC education is attainable and affordable. We must support students’ lifelong learning throughout their careers. And we must take advantage of all the tools available to us to advance this mission. In this way, we will reaffirm why the University of California matters so deeply to this state, the country, and the world.
Thank you.