Eating Our Seed Corn
by digby
In 1960, a committee of educators working under the leadership of the visionary University of California President Clark Kerr handed Pat Brown, an equally farsighted governor, something he’d long hoped for: a master plan for higher education in California.
Brown and Kerr shared a desire to create a system that would simultaneously encourage academic excellence and equality of opportunity for students of every class and background. They succeeded beyond even their expansive dreams and, in the process, created not simply a network of world-class academic institutions but also a great engine of social progress and prosperity for the California economy.
The plan guaranteed the top 12.5% of the state’s high school graduates places in the UC system; the top one-third of graduates were assured places in the state colleges; and free community colleges were open to all. A graduate of the latter’s two-year programs was guaranteed admission as a transfer student to a university or state college. Fees and books at those institutions amounted to a few hundred dollars a year.
A special legislative session passed the plan as the Donahoe Higher Education Act and, within short order, slightly more than half of all California high school graduates were attending college — in an era when less than a third of all Americans went on to higher education. The public universities’ burgeoning web of affordable professional schools amplified the system’s effect. Its contribution to the decades of unparalleled prosperity that followed can’t be calculated.
Of all the damage that has been done in recent years by Sacramento’s habitual flight from fiscal responsibility — particularly during the disastrous Schwarzenegger years — none has been more injurious or perverse than the budgetary mistreatment of the state’s universities and community colleges. Starved for adequate funds, what was once California’s greatest guarantor of social mobility based on merit has become, in fact, a force for the growing inequality that threatens this state’s future.
We did this to ourselves, under the influence of decades of anti-tax propaganda and corporate sponsored referenda designed to choke the system, finally culminating in the silliness that drove us to stage a recall circus that installed a cyborg in the Governor’s mansion. We have now reached the zenith of Randian achievement and are a completely dysfunctional government. Huzzah.
It’s a cautionary tale: as California goes, so goes the nation.
h/t to bb