Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Demolition of Higher Education in California

Betrayed. That’s the word I keep coming back to when I think about the demolition of public higher education in the state of California.


End of the world as I knew it is another way I keep thinking about it.


Of course, it isn’t just me personally who’s been betrayed, it’s the grand vision of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California. Since I’m a child of that Master Plan, though, I can’t help but take it personally. I was three years old when it was adopted into law, and I, along with millions of others, have benefitted from it all my life.


The Master Plan reaffirmed “California’s long-time commitment to the principle of tuition-free education to residents of the state” ( www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mp.htm). It established the tripartite higher education system: University of California, California State University System, and the Community College system, and established a financial aid program (the Cal Grant program), meant to help students who could be admitted to private colleges and universities in the state, but couldn’t afford to attend.


That would be me. As a first-generation student from a working-class family, I was admitted to Mills College, and couldn’t have gone without both aid from the college and a Cal Grant. That was the first benefit to me of the Master Plan. I got a first-rate undergraduate education, and then I went on to get a Master’s Degree through the CSU. Fees at San Jose State when I attended in the mid-1980s were something like $225/semester. My books cost more than my fees! I worked about 30 hours a week, and managed to get through the whole program without taking out student loans. And then I decided to get a PhD.


I was admitted to Stanford, but going there would have meant borrowing lots of money, so I went to the University of California, instead, and did indeed earn a PhD. And after a total of 11 years of publicly-supported higher education (through financial aid and public institutions), I had so little debt that I had it paid off within seven years of earning my final degree.


But things have changed.


The local paper just ran a story on high school graduates who’ve been accepted to colleges and can’t afford to go. It leads with someone who wanted to go to USC ($53,700/year) and can’t, but ends with a student who wanted to go to UC Berkeley (and was accepted there). He’s an honor student who has applied for scholarships—and who still can’t afford to go to the public 4-year university. “Instead, Rodriguez—the first in his family to go to college—got an Oxnard College scholarship that pays for tuition and books.” So there we have it—a bright, ambitious, promising first-generation student with the door slammed in his face. At least it slammed softly—he can at least go to Oxnard College. But it’s a community college with a transfer rate of less than 5%. And that’s not good enough! It’s not as good as I was given a generation ago.


A few years ago I heard the then-President of the American Association of University Professors call the California State University system the greatest experiment in democracy he knew of. (For confirmation of that, check out www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpperspective.htm). Well, that experiment is about to be shut down. Literally, shut down two days a month, its employees furloughed to cut 10% on salary costs, because the state is about to drastically cut the CSU budget—again. The CSU’s budget will have been cut by nearly a third from 2007-08; and in 2007-08, the CSU’s budget was already below the level it had been in 2001-02 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).


How much more can it take before it bleeds to death?


There is already an unmet demand for places in the CSU—estimates are that 10,000 more students would like to enroll than there is space for. Now, the CSU may need to reduce its enrollment by another 20,000.


How much more damage can the state do to the vision laid out in 1960? Remember that “long-time commitment to the principle of tuition-free education to residents of the state”?


As late as 1987, in the Master Plan Renewed, the commitment to publically-supported education was rearticulated: “The state shall continue to be primarily responsible for funding postsecondary education, and students shall continue to pay a portion of the cost; but student charges shall not be changed substantially in any single year. Fees shall be maintained by the state and governing boards in a constant relationship to state support within each segment, and fee increases that do occur shall be waived or offset by financial aid for needy students.”


But in the revision to the Master Plan adopted in 2002, that commitment is explicitly rescinded: “Because enrollment in postsecondary education is not a fundamental right like K-12 enrollment, and because nearly all postsecondary students are 18 years old or older, the State does not strive to meet the full costs of operations for public colleges and universities through direct General Fund appropriations” (www.cpec.ca.gov/Publications/MasterPlanIndex.asp).


According to an eye-opening and depressing report, “California at the Edge of a Cliff: The Failure to Invest in Public Higher Education is Crushing the Economy and Crippling Our Kids’ Future,” the “state has been shifting the costs of operating its universities from state taxpayers to students and their families since 1980.” (www.postsecondary.org). Another report, “Cumulative Impact: How cuts to higher education in the recent past, today and in the near future will affect access and opportunity for California students,” reiterates this: “Higher education can enhance quality of life for students (long after graduation) and acts as a major engine of economic growth for the state. Nevertheless, during the past several years, the share of higher education costs paid by the state has been declining and the share paid by students and their families has been increasing” (www.collegecampaign.org).


I keep thinking of the irony of President Obama recommending that every American get at least one year of higher education while California is reducing the number of opportunities available, and making the remaining opportunities more expensive.


What I’ve been doing here is what I was taught to do by my extensive, publicly-funded education: laying out rational arguments based on facts and research. But I began with how I feel—betrayed, and I want to end with how I feel. Going through higher education and then becoming a professor, I always felt I wasn’t really supposed to be here, that I was an outsider, not the kind of person who was supposed to be in institutions of higher education. Now it’s clear that I was right—the door was briefly opened. Now it’s been slammed shut again. And I feel like my fingers were in the doorway when it slammed.