It’s been a long time, nearly 50 years, since Governor Pat Brown‘s vision for California brought us what was so frequently dubbed the “California Dream.” We had infrastructure that rivaled if not exceeded any in the world. We had a strong social safety net that enabled Californians to pursue careers in the burgeoning middle class. And we had the “Master Plan for Higher Education” that promised highly subsidized education for those Californians that met a basic set of requirments, and shut nobody out.
At the heart of the Master Plan, were the community colleges. The community colleges allowed students who underperformed at high schools to get back on track for a higher degree. They were to be plentiful, high-quality, and cheap. The state was going to kick in 35-40% of the operating revenue, with a bunch of additional funding coming from the county level. You may think that strange given the way the state works today, but back then, pre-Prop 13, counties actually had their own sources of revenue. They could rely on the property taxes and other local taxes to provide opportunities to fund programs like the community colleges.
The community colleges were then to feed in to the newly upgraded UC and CSU systems. At the time, UC was already on of the world’s leading research systems. CSU would soon grow to take a very important “middle” place for students. It was originally intended for only bachelor’s and master’s degrees, with the doctarates being issued at the UC campuses. The various CSU campuses would focus on teacher certification and other public service functions, with the UC doing the bulk of the top-flight research. (Photo Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.
But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown’s son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.
All this is made even more evident today as a Mass Walkout is occuring on all of the UC campuses from San Diego all the way up to Davis, students, faculty, and staff are walking out on classes to picket the university and its administration. And the administration is facing some tough questions of its own, particularly relating to admistrative bloat.
The latest blow to the system is the loss of about $110 million that the community colleges had been expecting from the stimulus bill. Unfortunately, the draw down requirements were not met by our 2009 budget, so those federal dollars go unspent as the community colleges cut classes and limit enrollment, a bitter irony when compared to their original goal of being the “open door” for California students.
But when you look at what used to be the grand scheme for California higher education, you can see the problem is far greater than any administrative bloat or lack of stimu-bux can really address. While trying not to look like an apologist, instead of pointing the finger at Yudof and crew, we should be looking to Arnold and his Republican predecessors and cohorts.
We have destroyed what was once the envy of the world, and are hard at work turning it in to nothing better than a mid-level private education system. At least when you head to the Farm down in Palo Alto, you know you are going to get high fees and tuition. With the UC’s students are left in limbo, thinking they were going to get an affordable education. I’ll leave you with the words of one of my professors at Berkeley, George Lakoff:
Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB’s Townsend Center that “the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world’s greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy.”(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09
that you can separate the internal and external issues as much as you suggest. The Regents and UCOP have gone along for a significant amount of time with the defunding of the University and the shifting of the burden onto students. And President Yudof has a history of bemoaning fee increases but imposing them whenever he has been President.
should be recognized for doing what they can, within present circumstances, to try and preserve educational qualiity by increasing tuition.
They can’t do much about accessability….that’s the Legislature’s job….in fact the Legislature has long pushed to expand access while steadily trimming support. In the CSU, a decade ago, the state paid over 11,000 per student in support. Today, adjusted for inflation, the figure is well under 5,000.
Campuses have been judged on their ability to grow, but now, the CSU has called a halt. Chancellor Charles Reed has ordered the 23 campuses to collectively trim enrollments by 40,000 students. He and the trustees have no other choice. Lack of state funding means that enrolling those students would leave the campuses holding the bag.
And speaking of holding the bag, those same campuses also are being given no money to fund increases in energy and health costs, even though both have been rising steadily.
and to add to the fun, the state has routinely marched in and retroactively “retrieved” (read stolen) funds originally allocated to individual campuses for things like capital projects….for no other reason than that they need those bucks to balance their own budget disaster.
The end result….budget cuts on individual campuses approaching 20% in ONE year, faculty and staff furloughs amounting to about a 10-11% pay cut, a 30% increase in tuition, and freezes or sharp limits on hiring, travel and purchases.
It’s grim….but there is one thing you can be sure of. As things look now, next year is going to be even worse.
The fee increases that they’re asking for are NOT tuition. It is illegal under the California constitution to charge state residents any form of tuition. The only people that pay tuition (i.e. the cost of their actual education) are out-of-state students who elect to enroll in UC schools.
The money being charged to CA students are fees. Those fees CAN NOT BE USED TO PAY FOR ANYTHING RELATED TO EDUCATION. So any increase in these fees is used to pay for admin costs and non-education related expenses.
It’s unfortunate people don’t make this distinction as you realize that people are going to go way into debt to essentially subsidize the admin side of the University.
More to the point -it was a low cost, high quality higher education system that made Silicon Valley and other innovations possible. We are competing with other countries that practically give away higher ed to their smartest kids, and instead we just make it expensive and out of reach for people and are now admitting people based on wealth, not necessarily on talent.
California continues to circle the drain…when do we finally flush it?