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By Amanda Carpenter

Protesting hikes

California students staged sit-ins at campuses across the state over the weekend to protest a planned 32 percent tuition increase for University of California schools.

The regent's board voted for the hike on Thursday, and students began demonstrating at campuses in Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, saying they were being "tuition gouged." The increases will add $2,500 to undergraduate fees, beginning in the fall 2010 semester.

Students who occupied a campus building at UCLA left peacefully on Thursday evening. At UC-Davis, however, the protests didn't end so quietly. Fifty-two arrests were made Thursday. And 41 UC-Berkeley students were arrested on Friday. The last holdouts were students at Santa Cruz, where students occupied campus buildings for three nights. At press time on Sunday, police were expected to come and remove them that day.

Most of the arrested students were charged with trespass and then released.

Paying the bills

Students in California aren't the only ones struggling to pay tuition fees. The listed "sticker prices" are going up at all college campuses, and so are the loans that students are taking out to pay for the increases.

The listed costs of tuition and fees, not including board, at public four-year colleges have increased 20 percent over the past five years, according to the College Board's latest report on tuition costs. The average published cost for in-state students at a public, four-year college is $7,020.

Colleges often try to downplay the cost increases by emphasizing the amount of student aid available to students to pay for tuition but that includes loans students have to pay off, not freebie grants and scholarships.