With about four weeks until the Nov. 7 election, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his opponent, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, are tapping into the college student-voting bloc by promising lower college fees and more accessibility to education for all.

However, students can easily get lost in the flurry amid negative ads and public promises.

Ryan Joven, a senior business marketing major, said he doesn’t feel like he’s being reached by the campaigns from either side in terms of each candidate’s plans for higher education.

“I don’t know too much about Angelides, and the governor hasn’t kept his promises,” Joven said. “It’s hard to say who I’d vote for at this moment.”

Rob Wassmer, professor of public policy and economics at Sacramento State, said voters are at a crossroad facing the state’s tight budget issues and having to decide what kind of state California is going to become.

Wassmer said if California wants to be a state that is unwilling to cut funding in social programs and education, then tax increases are necessary. If people want lower taxes, then cuts in funding have to be made to compensate the budget.

Democratic candidate Angelides, who has been painted as a champion for the middle class, said he plans to avoid cuts in education and health care by increasing tax on the wealthiest 1 percent of Californians, according to his campaign website.

“If students are just voting (based on) their own short term interest then it’d be Angelides,” Wassmer said. “In four or five years, they’re going to become taxpayers themselves. Now they want the lower fees, but do they want a higher-tax burden in the future to support the lower fees?”

Brian Brokaw, Angelides’ campaign spokesman, said Angelides plans to cut the cost of four-year degrees at Universities of California by nearly $5,000 and the cost of degrees at California State Universities by $2,000 by rolling back tuition and fees to where they were before Schwarzenegger took office.

“It’s easier for someone who is not the current governor to make those promises, but to Angelides’ credit, he’s talked about having to raise taxes,” Wassmer said. “The only way you could roll back fees and provide more money to higher education is to raise taxes. Somebody who says they can do that without raising taxes is being disingenuous.”

Schwarzenegger’s Campaign Spokeswoman Amanda Fulkerson said while the governor is against raising taxes, he plans to balance the budget by stimulating economic growth and expansion.

“The governor definitely made colleges one of his first priorities,” Fulkerson said. “He made the pact with UC and CSU schools to control tuition increases.”

The six-year pact, which is called the Higher Education Compact, was signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger, CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed and UC President Robert C. Dynes in May 2004. It states that the CSU and UC systems would receive increases in funding in exchange for increased student enrollment and allows a steady increase of student fees that cap at 10 percent each year until the end of the six years.

However, the governor issued a “fee buyout” in the 2006-07 budget that provided the university systems extra funding to avoid the student fee hike that was set for the school year.

Since Gov. Schwarzenegger took office in 2003, the annual undergraduate student fees at Sac State have increased from $2,520 to $3,072, according to the Common Data Set from the Office of Institutional Research.

“What students want to remember is that if they want to (be) honest with themselves, most of the benefit of the education they get goes to them,” Wassmer said. “The U.S. Department of Labor has projections that if you get an undergraduate degree, you’re going to make a million dollars more over your lifetime. So to ask students to pay a little higher fees, even to take out some debt to have that future income is reasonable.”

Mary Chou can be reached at [email protected]