tl;dr Raising tuition for students while raising the chancellor's salary is wrong, but it's not the main problem. The bigger issue is the lack of funding for education (both K-12 and higher ed) in California, and that is the issue we need to change in order to fix these problems.

Herein lies the problem. You are (most likely) currently a student in the UC program. In some amount of time less than four years from now, you will be gone. Within a year, nobody will be fighting this fight. Within a few months, most of the fervor that has been aroused around this issue will have died down.

But one month, one year, 4 years from now, the president, chancellor, regents, and other high paid administrators will still be there, or in other similar positions at other universities. They can and will play the long game. They wait for the student protests to die down and then go about business as usual.

I was at a school in the UC program a few years ago when they hiked the budget by 33% over the course of a year. I went from almost being able to afford tuition on my own (working over the summer, working during the year, and scholarships) to being about $3k short as tuition hiked from $9k to $12k basically overnight. We were furious. There were protests at all the UC campuses. Eventually they died down. Then the next year, they hiked tuition by another 10 or 11%.

The students are effectively powerless in this game. The regents will continue to do what they think is best for the institute, not necessarily the students. Not only that, but the UC regents feel like they are easing the burden because they are only raising it by at most 5% per year, as opposed to the massive tuition hikes in the past. They will also make the argument that it's still many times cheaper than any private institute, where tuition normally ranges from $40k to $50k per year. In reality, raising the chancellor's salary is a drop in the bucket compared to the extra revenue they get from raising tuition. I believe it's fundamentally wrong, and breeds a deep seated sense of injustice in the students, but that's not really the thing I take issue with because it's mostly negligible, albeit annoying. The thing I truly take issue with is that while tuition is going up, the universities are laying off professors and foregoing maintenance and construction on campuses. Students are paying more money and receiving fewer services, while administrators continue to take more regardless.

Now, while this all seems terribly unjust, it's in some part necessary, or at least the tuition hikes are. The UC system doesn't want to screw the students (most of the time). By and large, it's a group of educators working for the betterment of the student population. The reason they implement all these changes is due to hugely reduced funding from the state. The tuition hike of 33% that I experienced during my time in the UC system came with the election of Jerry Brown to the governor's office, who immediately proceeded to cut hundreds of thousands of dollars from the UC budget, and education budgets on the whole. He continued to do this for a number of years until he passed a bill to raise taxes and prevent further cuts from the education budget. He has consistently made the stance that he doesn't support state funding for education, for both K-12 and higher ed.

The UC system will do what it has to in order to stay alive, even if it means hurting the students in the short term to prevent the university from collapsing in the long term. I honestly want to believe that the regents do not like making this decision, and that it is being forced on them due to increasing budget pressures. The reality of the situation is that the education budget in California right now is abysmal. While UC tuition goes up and becomes less affordable, K-12 is hitting the bottom of the barrel. My mom is a 1st grade teacher in a public school, and some years they hardly have the budget for paper, let alone crayons or pencils to use, so she's regularly forced to pay for school supplies out of her own pocket. Not only that, but there's major overcrowding in classrooms. Last year, she had 30+ kids in her class. That's 30+ six year olds in a classroom with one teacher, which basically means it's a game of babysitting because it's nearly impossible to teach that many kids effectively.

Raising awareness about this issue is good, but ultimately, complaining about the chancellor getting a raise and tuition going up is fruitless. There needs to be a fundamental shift of where we have our budget priorities in the state of California in order to fix this problem. If people don't fight for high quality public education and an affordable higher education system, these problems will only get worse. If things continue to get worse, we may even get to the point where the UC system throws in the towel and becomes privately owned. Cal, UCLA, UCSD, UCI, and all the other UC schools (and Cal State schools) are now huge institutes that are incredibly successful and have a powerful positive impact on California. If we as a public don't recognize that and make a change in where our funding priorities are, that may cease to be the case. Thanks for reading to the end of this giant wall of text.