The current print edition of the American Prospect has a center pullout section on Inequality Goes to College. It’s worth reading, though hardly cheerful. And the Golden State is all over it.
From David Kirp, “Our Two-Class System,” A2-A4 of the November 2009 American Prospect, on A4:
“The extraordinary compact between state governments and their flagship universities” has been consigned to the junkyard of history, observes Mark Yudof. As the president of the University of California who earlier ran the university systems in Texas and Minnesota, he has as cleareyed a perspective on higher education as anyone. Fifty years ago, the Golden State linked two world class universities, Berkeley and UCLA, with a scattering of teachers’ colleges and agricultural schools, building a system of public higher education that has been a world model ever since. The state’s Master Place guarantees community college for every high school graduate; solid undergraduate teaching for the top 33 percent; and, for the brightest young Californians, an education at internationally renowned universities, including seven of the top 50 research institutions in the widely cited Jiao Tong Shanghai University 2008 world rankings. These universities have also been at the forefront of expanding access to low-income students. There are more recipients of federal Pell grants (awarded to students whose families earn less than $45,000 a year) at Berkeley than at the Ivy League campuses combined.
That’s one reason why Berkeley ranks first in Washington Monthly‘s 2009 university rankings, which emphasize social mobility, research, and service, and six of the ten UC campuses rank in the top 25…. As the editors note, “UC campuses enroll unusually large numbers of low-income students, while maintaining high graduation rates, generating billions of dollars in research funding, and sending a healthy number of students into service programs like the Peace Corps.”
Now this much-lauded system is on the verge of imploding, a casualty of shifting public priorities. In the past 30 years, as California’s population grew by more than 50 percent, the state has built just one new university campus but 22 prisons. Since 1990 state support for each UC student has been reduced by 40 percent. The 2008-2009 budget was cut by $813 million, with bigger losses anticipated next year. Consequently, community colleges and universities have had to limit enrollment, turning away thousands of students for lack of space and marking an end to the promise of universal access. The City College of San Francisco found itself peddling naming rights to courses, at $6,000 apiece, to keep them from being eliminated. Across the University of California system, professors are being lured away by offers from universities that smell blood in the water.
From Michael Hout, “Rationing College Opportunity,” A8-A10, on A8:
California led the nation on the way up and on the way down. Going up, California built 13 new universities in the 11 years from 1954 to 1965. The Master Plan for Higher Education set high standards: college degrees for one-third of the state’s young people and elite degrees from University of California campuses for the top one-eighth of each class. The state promised to pay the instructional and infrastructural costs. Tuition was free; students paid fees for room, board, and extracurricular services. Few states could match the scale and scope of California’s systems, but nearly every state provided more public higher education in 1975 than in 1955.
California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 state wide ballot initiative to roll back property taxes, sparked retrenchment. In 1979, a second proposition, known as the Gann Amendment, strictly limited spending. Thirty-seven other states, in some form or another, followed California’s lead. Overall revenue and spending limits held college enrollment growth to the same pace as population growth.
Before the tax revolt, legislative Republicans had been the universities’ champions. After Prop. 13 and Gann, most were committed to cutting state spending, even university spending. As ballot initiatives piled up, voters inadvertently crowded out higher-education spending with other spending mandates. Proposition 98 in 1988 gave K-12 education and community colleges budget guarantees that hurt state universities. Proposition 184 in 1994 mandated 25 years to life imprisonment for three-time offenders, sparking a prison boom. With total spending capped, California’s zero sum budget left higher education as one of the few categories open for discretionary cuts. The governor and legislature nearly always made them.
Although no other state enacted anything as binding as the limits of California’s Proposition 13 and Gann Amendment, only a few rapidly growing states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, continued to expand public higher education. Elsewhere, expansion was off the table.
The Edge of the American West 
20 comments
October 25, 2009 at 12:14 pm
TF Smith
Okay, but it is hard to feel much sympathy for the UC Regent’s problems when the single campus they did find funding for since 1979 is UC Yosemite Lake…and they continue to maintain not one, but two sets of NFL and NBA farm teams…
Now, if the Regents had taken over the Presidio after the Army pulled out and created a full-spectrum UC San Francisco as a rival to Cal and UCLA , building on the med school and Hastings, I would give them a lot of credit, but a greenfield in the San Joaquin Valley? Not exactly a brilliant move…if there is really a such a need in the SJV, then “UCing” Fresno and “CSUing” Merced would have made a lot more sense.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but since 1979, the taxpayers/students/parents of the Golden State have paid for the aforementioned UC Merced, plus a brand-new state university campus in San Marcos, much of two others (Monterey and Channel Islands) converted from existing publicly-held property, and for what amounted to a near-total rebuild of a fourth CSU campus after the 1994 Northridge quake – and for the integration of the Maritime Academy into the system, for that matter.
(And, for that matter, for renaming Hayward “East Bay,” for what that was worth…as stupid administration tricks go, that was a good one).
And all of the above occurred during the same period as various very real improvements have been made at the state’s pre-K through 12 and CC level – which is where the college students are suppposed to be pulled from, as opposed to non-residents, emigres, and future H1B visa holders…and even though they are all bigger cash cows than Joe or Maria Californian; there is a point for having “state” institutions, after all…
Yudof is an idiot, I agree, but that being said, I realize that “State’s taxpayers continue trend of investment in public education from pre-kindergarten through doctoral level in face of economic instability engendered by globalization and end of the Cold War even though the UCs and CSUs continue to admit ever larger numbers of foreign and non-resident students” isn’t quite as sexy as “the sky is falling” but come on…
California’s public university system remains the finest in the world, true or false?
If false, please provide an example of a state that has done better…
October 25, 2009 at 1:07 pm
DaKooch
. . . and I would like to point out another pet complaint. In the late 60s I and many of my co-students could work summer jobs courtesy of the Teamsters, Steelworkers and UAW (our father’s unions) that paid for half our tuition, room/board at some of the best private universities when such was $2000-2500 a year. Today, not only are those jobs not available, but the same yearly cost is in excess of $30,000 beyond the range of any “student” job I can think of short of drug-dealing.
October 25, 2009 at 3:21 pm
eric
it is hard to feel much sympathy for the UC Regent’s problems
Strangely, I don’t think anyone is expressing their concern in terms of sympathy for the regents.
October 25, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Vance
Right, and even granting that the Regents can be blamed for UC’s problems, our response should not be “so much the worse for UC!” If it needs to be rescued from bad management as well as from underfunding, so be it — it’s worth rescuing.
October 25, 2009 at 4:54 pm
TF Smith
Strangely, they are the decision-makers, however, for good or for ill – and shorthand for the system, if nothing else.
Yudof is an idiot, undoubtedly, and when Brown takes office undoubtedly will be replaced by someone better, but where, exactly, have Joe and Jane Taxpayer failed the the cause of higher education in California?
Two brand-new campuses (one UC and one CSU), what amounted to a complete re-build of an existing campus (CSUN), two additional new campuses as conversions of/additions to existing public facilities (CSUCI and CSUMB), and the integration of an existing state facility (CMA) to the CSU system – so six additional campuses in the past 30 years, not one.
And about a dozen CSU off-campus centers, and all during a period the state has been transitioning from a primarily industrial-agricultural economy to something very different…
It doesn’t look like higher ed has been shortchanged by Californians in recent decades, given all the bricks and mortar involved, and with all due respect to Messers. Kirp and Hout, it hardly sounds like an “implosion,” either…
But when “only” one new campus is cited, as in “…in the past 30 years, as California’s population grew by more than 50 percent, the state has built just one new university campus but 22 prisons…” it sort of brings their reporting abilities into question.
October 26, 2009 at 8:45 am
Roy Rogers
This is in the New Republic today:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/end-state
October 26, 2009 at 9:06 am
Mo MacArbie
I was struck by the PAC-10 ad during the USC-Oregon St. game saying that the conference offered a “rich learning environment.” Brother, you ain’t kidding.
October 26, 2009 at 11:07 am
bitchphd
What, precisely, is the complaint about UC Merced other than its location?
I ask because it’s a pet theory of mine that white flight is behind the tax revolt that’s at the root of the problem: once schools had to start integrating in the 70s (and the district I went to, in Stockton, started district-wide busing in 1977, if my math is correct–in any case, I was in 4th grade), the middle-class (white) taxpayer base began seeing taxpayer-funded education as something for “them,” not “us.”
To some extent, with apologies to TF Smith, I wonder how much of the pooh-poohing I occasionally hear about UC Merced is related to a similar sense that “those people/that place” (valley yokels, farmers, farmworkers, the increasingly Latino valley) aren’t real UC material. Which is partly about class as well as race, no doubt, and is also based on my understanding of the mission of UC Merced being specifically to educate the kids of the farmworkers who built and support the valley’s economic base. It seemed a great idea to me at the time, and still does (though admittedly, being out of the system, I really have no idea what’s going on on that campus and haven’t followed it closely). My anecdotal experience, having grown up in the CV, is that a *lot* of families there–especially families without a college background, and especially especially non-white families without a college background–are super reluctant to send kids far from home.
I’ve always assumed that this was part of the rationale behind UC Merced, and that part of its reputation as not-up-to-snuff has to do with its mission and the same mindset that my hometown peers had to the local community college (and that cc students here in my new hometown, Ventura, often have): that *because* it’s local and available to them, it’s almost by definition kinda crappy. Which blah blah internalized oppression, classism, and so forth.
All of which is to say I’m really curious about that campus, and wish it well.
October 26, 2009 at 6:34 pm
andrew
Looks like the Water Resources Center Archive might be shut down next year.
October 26, 2009 at 6:35 pm
andrew
I think I just got spam filtered for a link.
[No longer! — Ed.]
October 26, 2009 at 7:23 pm
TF Smith
Dr. B –
I’m not denigrating UC Merced as an institution; I’m sure it is a fine school, and I am certain the region it serves generates as high a per-capita percentage of UC-level students as anywhere else in the state; my objections are elsewhere.
Primarily, they are in regard to how the Regents and Sacramento, having decided the state could in fact afford a tenth UC campus (itself a questionable decision, I think), bowed to political pressure and built on a greenfield site in the central San Joaquin, when the central San Joaquin is already served by Davis.
Simply looking at population density, there are far more potential students in the Bay Area and/or southern California then there are (or will ever be) in the San Joaquin Valley; common sense would suggest that building a new UC campus in either region (if not both) would have served far more Californians than a campus in Merced County. See this map for an idea of the demographics being served (or not) by UC Merced:
Couple that poor decision-making with the absolutely inexcusable decision not to take advantage of the Army’s withdrawal from the Presidio – located in a city where the UC already has two institutions that could have served as insititutional core of a new full spectrum university – and it is very hard to see UC Merced as a particularly rational act of public policy.
A greenfield campus is also an interesting comparison, and raises some very real equity issues, with the policies of re-use demonstrated in the siting of CSU CI (formerly Camarillo State Hospital) and CSU MB (formerly Ft. Ord). CSU SM was a greenfield site, but I am not aware there was a potential reuse site in northern San Diego County available in the appropriate time frame.
Of course, if in fact it is arguable that a UC campus should have been built in the SJV, then building on a greenfield site in Merced County, rather than upgrading CSU Fresno, was a ridiculous decision, expecially with regards to sustainabiity and in terms of serving the largest population center in the southern San Joaquin Valley – which, if we really want to add equity to the equation, is in far greater need of public investment than Merced County.
Best,
October 26, 2009 at 11:08 pm
TheBrucolac
TF,
You’re obviously right about population density. But the Merced decision, as B points out, is about more than simply serving the greatest number of students. The southern valley is a (if not the center) of the immigration that is the state’s real source of population growth. And it is more than anecdotally true (not that I can provide data at this time of night) that Hispanic students are much less likely than others to attend, and stay in, school far from home. Part of UC’s job has to be educating the children of California’s immigrants. It just has to be. And a Central Valley campus is the way that’s going to happen.
But you’re right about the stupidity of greenfield construction as well– the Fresno State conversion was probably the way to go. And, in fact, Davis is probably the least space-constrained of the ten campus (maybe Riverside, too), so that might have been a better route. (That just highlights the fact that it doesn’t make too much sense to claim that UCM serves “Merced County.” Kids will go farther than that.) I suspect, however, that it was a Sacramento call in defense of what exists, not a Regents decision.
And speaking of politics, the Presidio would have been a scrum and a half. Did you see what those neighbors did to Don Fisher’s art museum? I’d say they killed it, if that weren’t in such poor taste following is death. Nimby litigation held up the Laurel Heights UCSF campus for the better part of a decade. In fact,I can’t think of a recent campus expansion or establishment that didn’t inspire litigation (CSU CI maybe?).
All of which is to say, politics– including (maybe especially) local politics– are real. We can pretty easily plot out an ideal set of UC/CSU campuses. That we don’t have that system seems to be a problem with the world, or at least with California, not one that can be narrowly pinned on Sacramento or the Regents. Particular decisions are blameworthy– eg, everything that’s come out the Office of the President and the Regents over the last few months– but the siting stuff is constrained in ways that make good decisions very hard, even for people of good will.
October 26, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Paul Orwin
It is interesting to me to see how the UC becomes “higher education” in California (I think TF Smith is also addressing this a bit). The CSU system educates a much larger and broader cross-section of californians, and has been under financial pressure for years (I am a professor at CSUSB, so have seen it first hand). For all of the hemming and hawing over Mark Yudof and the UC Regents, they are handling the budget situation well compared to the CSU system, which is struggling to say the least. I’m not sure what the solution is, and won’t speculate about whether UC Merced was a good idea or not (seems ok to me, but I’m no expert). While the comments about CSU Fresno are apt, it seems to me, this suffers from the delusion that any type of “Master Plan” still exists for higher ed in CA. The only thing on offer now seems to be endless cuts to prevent any type of taxation. Hard to see how this changes, frankly.
Oh, and by the way, if the students at CSU are the “top 1/3” of HS graduates, then I am going to be crying myself to sleep tonight.
October 27, 2009 at 6:39 am
TF Smith
Dear Prof. Orwin;
I appreciate the response; you have many good points, but at bottom the “10th UC campus” decision should be ranklesome to Californians because of the lack of financial, demographic, and common sense inherent in the decision (especially in regard to the availability of the Presidio, nimbyism or not), the utter lack of sustainability, and the obvious political pay-offs and (yet again) a state government commitment to sprawl.
As was said in the thread on the Chronicle about the proposed closure of the Water Resources Library at Cal, the UC’s ability to consider something today that never occured during the Depression is jaw-droppingly loathesome. That it comes as the same time as the powers-that-be are ready to sign on to yet another “Delta conveyance alternative” plan just shows how incredibly bankrupt, intellectually and otherwise, Sacramento has become…
Given the UC system’s ability (willingness? enthusiasm?) to tap into the Gallos and Resnicks of the world, much less the maintenance of the Golden Bears and Bruins, much less the pay and benefit scales for the Yudofs et al, (much less the continued employment of John Yoo), it would be appreciated if anyone writing about California higher ed went somewhere else than the “sky is falling/day of the locust” meme that hasn’t been fresh since 1850…someplace like, oh, I dunno, Cal State San Berdoo.
As you point out, the system that really does the heavy lifting in this state is the CSU, which graduates the engineers, teachers, managers, and public administration types that actually keep the state running, to a large extent.
And yes, the “top 1/3rd HS students” cohort seems to stretch an awful lot, but remember that these are teenagers who, unlike the UC-bound, are generally not coming from homes of A) college alums, or B) where the parent or parents on hand are worrying about putting food on the table and keeping the roof overhead, and only then paying for tuition, books, parking/housing, “student activity fees”, etc.
One thing that is interesting about Merced’s student demographics, in terms of the whole equity issue, is that Latinos/Hispanics/Mexican-American students are only a third – the exact same percentage as Asian/Asian-Americans. I’m also no expert, but I’m quite certain those numbers do not gibe with the demographics of the high school graduating classes in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
Best,
October 27, 2009 at 7:06 am
Paul Orwin
TF,
I think we agree on all of this, although, as I said, I’m not really very informed about the wisdom of UCM. But I think the points of BitchPhD and TheBrucolac are worth noting, i.e. there is symbolic and practical value to placing a UC in the southern Central Valley. Having watched the budget fight over the last 18m, there is no vitriol directed at Sacramento that I won’t support, but I’m not sure UCM is the thing to pick on (there are so many choices!). At the college administration level, it will be familiar to anyone from a collegiate workplace that building new stuff on top of your greenspace is just the way they want to do it, no matter what! Most likely, because that is where the money is, I guess?
As to the student quality issue, that was just standard issue prof-complaint, not meant to be taken as anything more than typical whining! I have spent enough time with these kids (and adults!) to have my heart broken more than once by the things they go through just to get to my classroom. I want nothing more than to see them make it, but we here in the CSU could use a few articles written about our problems, and maybe a few bucks sent our way by the Gallos etc :)
October 27, 2009 at 7:43 am
bsci
The population density argument here regarding Merced is fairly weak. Each UC has around 18000-27000 undergrads. The question isn’t whether a new campus is built in a dense area, but whether it will be able to attract and support 20,000+ students. To say it’s close to UC Davis is ridiculous. Assuming they have the money to create the buildings and hire faculty, the central valley is dense enough to attract that many students.
It’s unclear if a campus in the SF Presidio would be able to hold that many students and the undergrads wouldn’t be able to afford housing.
Perhaps a campus may form in San Jose at some point too (if money ever returns to UC), but there was clearly the potential student population to support a campus in Merced.
October 27, 2009 at 9:31 am
Vance
The Presidio is no longer in question, of course. But at the time it was decommissioned, one of its real attractions was a stock of housing on site.
October 27, 2009 at 7:23 pm
TF Smith
The Presidio is/was more than 1400 acres; UCLA is about 420, and the central campus at Cal is about 200, I believe.
The Presidio housed a garrison of more than 5000 officers and enlisted personnel and at least some of their dependents during WW II.
It could have been a showplace campus, and a prime example of sustainable re-use.
October 28, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Dan Harper
Many of the above comments are moderately interesting, but my training in philosophical hermeneutics and theology tells me to go back to the text, i.e., the actual post. in the Hout excerpt we find the following statement: “With total spending capped, California’s zero sum budget left higher education as one of the few categories open for discretionary cuts.”
In other words, arguing about the relative merits of UC Merced and the Presidio site misses a key point of the post, which is that quirks in the political system in California have forced severe limitations on spending for higher education. Rather than arguing about UC Merced, it would be far more productive to investigate why state funding for higher ed has been cut.
Viewed from that perspective, Bitch PhD’s remarks about white flight could prompt some interesting historical investigations. We might also find it productive to correlate decreased higher education funding with the end of post-war economic expansion in the 1970s. We might also find it productive to correlate the sudden change in political climate in the late 1970s that led to the (still-continuing) movement towards increasing conservatism in the U.S.
I’m more familiar with what’s going on in the non-profit sector, and I suspect we might find some interesting correlations between public-funded higher ed. and the disasters in the non-profit sector. Baumol’s Cost Paradox and other economic factors mean that the cost of human services now rise faster than the rate of inflation; rises in costs continue to outpace rises in revenue in much of the non-profit sector; this is almost assuredly a problem shared by public-funded higher ed. Further, an article in a recent issue of Standford Social Innovation Review (sorry, I don’t have the bibliographic citation right here) asserts that funders of non-profits have made demands that have resulted in inadequate funding for non-profit infrastructure — which may be a parallel with what we’re seeing in the UC system, where a huge increase in state population has not been matched by an increase in infrastructure (i.e., new campuses).
Anyway…. I’d be really interested to see someone do some serious research into the history of the past 50 years of public-sector higher ed., to maybe sort through what are the significant factors in the ongoing decline of the UC system. (I’m not so interested in ongoing bickering about some vague hypothesis about a UC campus in San Francisco. Just sayin.)
October 28, 2009 at 7:12 pm
TF Smith
Well, gee, Dan, maybe if you can explain how a state that has built/acquired not one but four new public university campuses, re-built a fifth from the ground up, and integrated a sixth separate state institution into one of the systems, and added 15 off-site centers is “not” an increase in infrastructure?
Using your training, of course…