UBI for low-income CalState students (maybe)

[jimbogumbo]

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/01/18/california-may-try-basic-income-college-students

[Parasaurolophus]

My only real concern is that this will reduce their access to other benefits like SNAP, Section 8 (if they've been lucky enough to get it), and possibly MedicAid. So you want to make sure that even at the top of the distribution, they still end up better off (since people are unlikely to try to figure it out for themselves--it's relatively complicated, and the social workers at the benefits office don't like to run hypotheticals on their spreadsheets for reasons I don't quite understand). (I'm assuming that they're mostly too young to be on SSI.)

If it's only SNAP (for no more than two people) that's affected, then it's a net plus pretty much no matter what. But you don't want to start screwing with the others, because the returns diminish quickly.

[marshwiggle]

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/01/18/california-may-try-basic-income-college-students

If everyone doesn't receive it, then it's not "universal". The title is poorly chosen for a program that targets a specific subset of the population, in this case students at one institution.

[jimbogumbo]

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/01/18/california-may-try-basic-income-college-students

If everyone doesn't receive it, then it's not "universal". The title is poorly chosen for a program that targets a specific subset of the population, in this case students at one institution.

I'm guessing universal in the same way a universe set doesn't mean everything, rather everything you are considering.

[marshwiggle]

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/01/18/california-may-try-basic-income-college-students

If everyone doesn't receive it, then it's not "universal". The title is poorly chosen for a program that targets a specific subset of the population, in this case students at one institution.

I'm guessing universal in the same way a universe set doesn't mean everything, rather everything you are considering.

But the point is it's going to have problems around the eligibility cutoff. The whole point of a universal payment is that there's no cutoff. Students just above the cutoff are (rightly) going to feel burned, since they'll be worse off than people just below the cutoff.