State Education Study Panel Delves Into 4-Year Colleges

A statewide commission charged with studying the future of California’s system of higher education has resumed hearings--this time focusing on the state’s four-year colleges and universities.

The commission, which has been at work for more than a year, has already recommended that the community colleges stop focusing on remedial education and adult recreational programs and concentrate on preparing students for jobs and transfer to four-year institutions.

Known formally as the Commission for the Review of the Master Plan for Higher Education, the commission is an independent group set up by the Legislature to consider whether major structural or budgetary changes should be made in California’s three systems of higher education--the University of California, the California State University and the California community colleges.

Explosive Question

Several important questions are sure to face the commission, which reconvened last week and will be deliberating over the spring and summer on the four-year institutions.

The most explosive is one already put forth by the Cal State system.

The plan, endorsed by Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds and the university’s Board of Trustees, is to allow Cal State to begin offering doctoral degrees--a role now assigned exclusively to UC under the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education.

The plan was designed to limit competition among the state’s colleges and universities by setting up a three-tiered system of education:

- The nine UC campuses were to accept students only from the top 12% of high school graduating classes. They offer undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees and provide the locus for the state’s major scientific and scholarly research.

- The 19 Cal State campuses were to draw students from the top one-third of the graduating classes and focus almost solely on undergraduate education, with special emphasis on the training of public schoolteachers.

- The 106 community colleges were to be open to all high school graduates and provide the first two years of undergraduate training, as well as specialized vocational and adult education programs.

Even though the master plan has been much admired and emulated outside California, Cal State officials are not alone within the state in attacking some of the plan’s fundamental tenets.

‘Not Gospel’

Arguing that the master plan is “not gospel,” Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) delivered a 38-page critique to the master plan review commission that is certain to provoke heated debate throughout the state over the next few months.

Hayden, who chairs the Assembly subcommittee on higher education, contends that the master plan gives unfair preference to the UC system at the expense of Cal State and the community colleges. As a result, he said, the state should at least partially abandon the plan and consider a major reorganization of its budget for higher education.

Instead of automatically giving the most money to the universities that have the best students, the state should reward institutions on the basis of how much they do for their students, whatever their academic qualifications, Hayden said.

Hayden’s proposal is based on a radical theory of education reform put forth nearly 20 years ago by Alexander Astin, a UCLA professor of education who is considered one of the country’s foremost authorities on teaching.

According to Astin, the most prestigious universities in the country--the ones that attract the brightest students and graduate the brightest students--are not necessarily the ones that do the most for their students. Many lesser-known colleges that enroll mediocre students do a great deal more toward helping students realize their potential, he said.

For arbitrary, historical reasons, Hayden said, California has allocated nearly twice as much money per student each year to UC as it does to community colleges. Yet, he said, it is not clear that UC does the best job.

Hayden said he bases his conclusion on an analysis of the 1985-86 general fund, from which he said UC was allocated $4,356 per student, Cal State $3,291, and the community colleges $1,716.

Universities, he said, should receive money based on their students’ improvement, rather than “the square feet of the buildings . . . or the number of warm bodies in the classroom.”

Educators throughout the state, particularly those at UC, defend those differences on the grounds that UC performs much more expensive research than do either the Cal State campuses or the community colleges.

William B. Baker, a senior vice president at UC who has been sharply critical of Hayden’s report, said the differences cited by Hayden are not necessarily an indication that Cal State or the community colleges actually spend less on undergraduate education than UC.

UC is, according to officials within the university, particularly sensitive to Hayden’s proposal at this time because it comes as the university faces a backlog of enrollment growth. The result is that UC now has years of unmet requests for buildings on nine campuses, which means it would like more money, not less.

An obvious problem with the Hayden-Astin approach, of course, is figuring out how to measure that quality. Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, a separate and permanent commission that deals with state educational issues, noted that a handful of universities around the country have tried to implement Astin’s ideas in recent years. Invariably, Callan said, they have had to struggle to find fair ways to measure just how much students improve in the course of their education.

Although Hayden would like to increase competition among the “tiers” on one hand, he also would like to use budget incentives to foster greater formal cooperation.

In particular, he said, he wants to see California’s public universities address in a much more concerted way some of the state’s most serious social and economic problems. Among those problems, he said, are the state’s industrial response to technological innovation, the emerging social and trade issues with East Asia, a projected shortage of 90,000 qualified teachers in the state’s public schools, the declining transfer rate from the community colleges to the four-year colleges and universities, and California’s ever-increasing number of minority groups--all of whom need access to college education.

While Hayden’s case for change in the four-year colleges is generally considered the first formal look at the four-year universities in many years, it is certainly not to be the last.

“I certainly don’t agree with everything he has to say. . . . But (these proposals) are sure to provoke some serious discussions,” said Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), who is chairing a joint legislative committee that is also reviewing the higher education master plan.

The master plan review commission will conduct hearings for about two months. In the summer, it will choose the areas on which it will concentrate its work and make formal recommendations to the Legislature in the spring of 1987, according to Lee R. Kerschner, the commission’s executive director.