Fiscal Crisis Predicted for Colleges

Hundreds of thousands of Californians will be denied access to the state’s colleges and universities within the next 20 years unless public funding dramatically increases to meet the rising numbers of students and the increasing costs of educating them, Rand Corp. researchers said Thursday.

In a report titled “Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal Crisis in California Higher Education,” Rand Corp. researchers Roger Benjamin and Stephen J. Carroll outline what they call a “time bomb ticking under California’s social and economic foundations.”

“The college degree has replaced the high school diploma as the entry card into productive employment,” the report says. “If this degree is increasingly out of reach for large segments of the California population, then a revolution in education is essential to avert increasing social unrest.”

The report, commissioned by the California Education Round Table--composed of leading education officials from throughout the state--is one of a number of recent efforts to focus attention on California’s projected “tidal wave” of 500,000 additional students who are expected to seek entry to the state’s public colleges and universities by 2005.

Each of the state’s systems--the University of California, Cal State and the community colleges--has already experienced enrollment increases each of the last three years.

That trend, coupled with 10 years of insufficient funding for higher education, is setting the state on the road to reneging on its goal of providing post-secondary education to all residents who can benefit from it, the report warns.

Compounding the problem, it says, is the fact that costs per student have risen while public funding has declined. Tuition increases, used to make up the balance, are seen as another factor threatening to limit access to post-secondary education.

Some of the stresses on the higher education system stem from changes in the economy. As industrial jobs--now accounting for less than 17% of the work force--are replaced by service industry positions, knowledge and skill are increasingly crucial to gaining employment, the researchers note.

“Those who stop at a high school diploma or before completing high school are likely to face a bleak economic future,” the report says, “a fact attested to by the growing disparity in the incomes of the rich and poor.”

Post-secondary training will become so important, Benjamin and Carroll write, that California should consider guaranteeing funding for higher education much the way Propositions 98 and 111 did for schools from kindergarten through grade 12 and for community colleges.

William H. Pickens, the executive director of the California Citizens Commission on Higher Education, a privately funded group that sponsored a symposium Thursday on the report, said getting the state government to redouble its commitment to higher education will be difficult, but not impossible.

“It’s realistic only if we change from the original master plan--in which the state financed all of higher education--to a shared responsibility,” Pickens said. “The state will finance a portion, the students will finance a portion and the institutions will make changes that will help finance some of it.”

The commission plans to offer Gov. Pete Wilson a plan next year for preserving access and quality in UC, Cal State and community colleges. Although still developing recommendations, the commission is examining ways to increase funding for higher education, which currently receives a smaller proportion of state funds than prisons.

Some education experts have suggested that the tuition at public colleges is too low, with taxpayers often subsidizing affluent families. But any move to increase tuition would face wide opposition--and it would take a brave politician to support such a plan.

Access and quality are at the heart of California’s vaunted master plan, which sets out the missions of each of the three segments of California’s public higher education system. It guarantees UC admission to the top 12% of the state’s high school graduates, Cal State admission to the top third and a community college seat to all other high school graduates.

But those guarantees are facing challenges because of the expected increase in college age students--the children of the baby boomers--and continuing debates over affirmative action.

That debate took a turn this month when a task force on Latino admissions proposed that standardized Scholastic Assessment Tests be eliminated as a requirement for application to UC. Such a move would make nearly 17% of all California high school graduates eligible for the elite UC schools, far more than the master plan’s limit of 12.5%--meaning that many eligible students would not get in.

“There is a collision coming,” Harold Williams, president and CEO of the Getty Trust and co-chairman of the citizens commission, said in a recent interview. “Access will not be available to all of the young people who expect it. This is a crisis facing the state--and we want to see it addressed.”

Occidental College President John Slaughter is the other co-chairman of the panel.

According to the Rand Corp. researchers, the solution to the pending problem lies in increasing public funding and institutional reform, primarily:

* Rethinking the state budget to give more to higher education and tying that funding to innovation and productivity.

* Restructuring the higher education bureaucracy to facilitate the redistribution of funds.

* Creating sharper differences between the individual schools in order to streamline services.

* Developing ways for the schools to share services and infrastructure.

* Strengthening the master plan with an eye toward expecting all California students to complete some form of post-secondary education.

If changes are not made, Benjamin and Carroll write, the gap between rich and poor in California will widen, and be drawn sharply along ethnic lines.

“It will not only undermine the productivity and international competitiveness of the California economy,” the report states, “but will also threaten the social and political stability of the state.”

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Enrollment Trend

A Rand report is one of a number of recent efforts to focus attention on surge of students expected to seek entry to California’s public colleges and universities by the year 2015.

1997: 1.3 million

2115: 2 million

Source: Rand