The Master Plan is in Tatters
By Peter Schrag
Columnist
California Progress Report
There’ll be more tuition increases and enrollment cuts this week at both the California State University and the University of California, plus the loud student and employee protests that will accompany them. They come just a few days after a PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California) poll showing that Californians have great regard for those public universities – they give them high approval ratings -- but don’t want to pay another dime to support them.
Most Californians just don’t seem to get the connection between their worries about the future and the severe budget cuts those universities have already suffered. Nor do the protestors understand that their problems originate not with university presidents and trustees, but in Sacramento and, often, with those same voters.
Meanwhile, two of our leading would-be governors, Republicans Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman, are competing over who can whack still more out of the state’s austere budget and the taxes to pay for it.
The leading (and so far the only) Democrat, Jerry Brown, who hasn’t yet officially declared, isn’t giving any specifics. But as governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown showed more disdain for the University of California than his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan did, and treated it more badly in his budgets. University employees shouldn’t complain about low pay; Brown famously declared; they were getting “psychic rewards.”
It’s therefore hardly an understatement to say that California desperately needs leaders who can make clear to voters and taxpayers not only the crucial importance of the state’s educational system to California’s future – all of it, from pre-school to the community colleges to graduate school research -- but the absurdity of an electorate demanding quality services but refusing to pay for them.
Instead the leading candidates pander to the meanest biases of a society that in the past thirty years has nearly abandoned its communitarian ethic. In its place, voters have learned – mostly from marketers and politicians – to ask, first and foremost, what government can do for them...
The polling business itself has reinforced those attitudes. In continually asking people what they think about almost every conceivable subject, it’s reinforced the idea that today’s poll results represent transcendent social wisdom.
In the process, the polls also reinforce the penchant of politicians to play to those beliefs. Jerry Brown’s own specialty has almost always been anti-politics: the politicians running against the system he helped make.
Most pols rarely challenge the conventional policy wisdom or advocate choices that might better serve the long-term interests of the larger community. We are living in an echo chamber in which polls, politicians and the media bounce the same constricted ideas from one to the other.
The other day, PPIC President Mark Baldassare, one of our most respected opinion samplers, inadvertently reinforced that process. Commenting on the difference between Californians’ high esteem for the state’s colleges and their unwillingness to raise either fees or taxes, Baldassare said voters are “struggling with a crisis in the economy and a crisis of confidence in their leaders.”
There’s no arguing with that statement, but it doesn’t point to a way out. To say only that merely reinforces the idea that things are immutable.
The leaders of the three segments of California’s higher education system, once a shining example for the world, are trying to remind both Sacramento and, increasingly, the people of California, of the enormous risk of leaving that system to rot.
University of California president Mark Yudof and other UC officials are also hoping to persuade the Obama administration and Congress that if the President is serious about increasing the graduation rate of the nation’s universities, once first among the world’s developed nations, now 14th and likely to fall still further behind, the federal government will have to help.
The feds have long funded university research and grants for low income students but, as Yudof says, Washington always assumed that higher education is essentially a state responsibility. As state support for higher education shrinks almost everywhere, the feds will have to provide additional resources not just for student aid, but to increase the capacity of universities, public research universities particularly, to produce the highly educated individuals who will generate the new ideas and technologies to keep the nation competitive.
The same goes for California, its economic competitiveness, and its health as a good society. If the United States is falling behind the world, California is falling ever farther behind the nation. California’s model Master Plan for Higher Education, which once guaranteed a place somewhere in a California college or university for every Californian able to benefit from it – and promised to do so at low cost – is, as Yudof said, “in tatters.”
At this moment, when thousands of additional students are knocking at the colleges’ doors, admissions are being curtailed, classes cut, and tuition raised beyond what anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.
Yet this is precisely the moment when additional investments in higher education are likely to yield the greatest long-term benefits. It’s California’s schools and universities that have always brought high tech and other innovative enterprises here and, in many instances, spurred the creation of new ones An economic crisis is not a time to cut spending; it’s a time to increase it. But is there anyone out there willing to say that?
_____________________________________________________________________
Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Wednesday for the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration will be published early in 2010.
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UC administrators emphasized that a third of the income from the undergraduate fee hikes and half of the extra graduate fees would go toward financial aid, and that more than half of undergraduates would be fully cushioned from the increases. The regents panel also approved a policy that would cover all the basic education fees with UC, state and federal aid for families with annual incomes under $70,000, up from $60,000 this year.
So lets examine what the effect of this measure is. In addition to a high state income tax, we raise the cost of attending in-state higher education for those children of taxpayers who provide a disproportionate share of the funding to at or near the cost of a good private school. Then to add insult to injury, we discount the price for the more worthy - ie, kids of the less well-off. So what is the practical effect of that?
No longer is the UC system a meritocracy - in truth it hasn't been for years with formal and informal quotas (and in some cases ceilings). So why would the wealthy - a group that is far more essential to California's economic success than illegal immigrants - continue to support the UC system?
We have set ourselves on a course where the children of the wealthy will be going to the private schools - schools which over the years will have greater and greater endowments and greater and greater networks of the well-to-do - and the UC system will lose the support of the very people who in the past have supported it the most.
How can we believe this is a good idea?
What does it portend for the future of public higher ecucation in California?
Please tell me this post is part of some kind of upcoming series you’re doing on the topic. I want to read more!
Greetings,
Samuel Reed.
They come just a few days after a PPIC (Public Policy Institute of California) poll showing that Californians have great regard for those public universities – they give them high approval ratings -- but don’t want to pay another dime to support them.
We have spent decades playing the various cards.
The class-envy card told voters that they could have it all - without paying for it - if they simply gave us their votes to soak the idle rich who had more than their share. What did that do to our sense of community?
The rich came to realize their status was simply that of prey. The designated ogre and revenue source. What did that do for their sense of community? How many just left?
The race card told minorities that they DESERVED it all - not based on their merits but merely based upon the fact that one of their ancestors - somewhere - sometime - was disadvantaged. They were, therefore, owed a free ride today. If they simply voted for us, we'd make that happen. They didn't have to study - didn't have to contribute - didn't have to act responsibly - they were OWED. What did that do to our sense of community.
The age card told the elderly that they were OWED special status, simply for surviving. It mattered not that - as a group - they were better off than those younger. If they simply voted for us we would give them special discounts and special privileges and none of this would need to be means-tested. What did that do to our sense of community?
and so it goes - issue after issue we have played on the worst fears of every group - for our own political advantage - doing our best to marginalize the people who had other ideas - ideas they believed to be as rational as our own. And in doing so, we have destroyed the fabric of that community. We have destroyed the consensus that public schools were important, in part because we wouldn't heed those who wanted their ideas listened to and tried. Every single family that homeschools a child is a likely vote against public school funding, but rather than listen to them - find ways to incorporate their ideas and beliefs - we ridicule them. What does that do to our sense of community.
No, we have been successful. We have convinced people that it is a dog-eat-dog world. There is no sense of community anymore. Each owes allegiance only to the particular pack it runs with.
We've been working hard to destroy the sense of community since the mid-1960s. Congratulations - this is what success looks like.
University of California President Yudof Approves $3,000,000 to Outsource UCB Chancellor’s Job
The UC President has a UCB Chancellor that should do the high paid job he is paid for instead of hiring an East Coast consulting firm to fulfill his responsibilities. ‘World class’ smart executives like Chancellor Birgeneau need to do the analysis, hard work and make the difficult decisions of their executive job!
Where do consulting firms like Bain ($3,000,000 consultants) get their recommendations?
From interviewing the senior management that hired them and will be approving their monthly consultant fees and expense reports. Remember the nationally known auditing firm who said the right things and submitted recommendations that senior management wanted to hear and fooled government oversight agencies and the public?
Mr. Birgeneau's executive officer performance management responsibilities include "inspiring innovation and leading change." This involves "defining outcomes, energizing others at all levels and ensuring continuing commitment." Instead of demonstrating his capacity to fulfill his executive accountabilities, Mr. Birgeneau outsourced them. Doesn't he engage University of California and University of California Berkeley (UCB) people at all levels to help examine the budget and recommend the necessary trims? Hasn't he talked to Cornell and the University of North Carolina - which also hired Bain -- about best practices and recommendations that might apply to UCB cuts?
No wonder the faculty and staff are angry and suspicious. Three million dollars is a high price for Californians to pay when a knowledgeable ‘world-class’ Chancellor is not doing his job.
Please help save $3,000,000 for teaching our students and request that the UC President require the UCB Chancellor to fulfill his executive job accountabilities!