State’s Master Plan for Higher Education

Your article (May 1) on the Master Plan for Higher Education emphasized the pressures for “change” in the master plan. As the only member of the original master plan team who has testified before the commission, I do have some idea as to what the master plan was all about. And my testimony to the commission emphasized just the opposite.

The master plan team addressed the Legislature’s question: “How can California serve the tremendous tidal wave of students within the fiscal capacity of the state and with due attention to access and quality?”

The answer was simple: efficiency and economy through specialization by segment. UC should be a top-notch graduate and research institution and should only have sufficient undergraduate offerings to support a strong graduate program. The state university should be the top-notch undergraduate and master’s level institution, and should not build a graduate empire. The community colleges should remain two-year institutions for a dual purpose--to send qualified students to four-year institutions for advanced work, and to serve as our version of the European technical institute by offering two-year vocational programs.

This was the master plan. Everything else about the Donohoe Act--provisions for admissions standards, governance, etc.,--was peripheral. The peripherals can, and possibly should, be changed from time to time. But the master plan itself--efficiency and economy through specialization by segment (we called it “differentiation of function”) cannot and should not be changed unless the state wishes to have less efficiency and economy, limited access, and reduced quality of its educational offering.

Almost every other state in the nation has dissipated its education dollars, thinned out its academic quality, and limited access by permitting all three types of institutions to battle for expansion and high-cost programs in the halls of their state legislatures. California has avoided that and as a result has been able to serve thousands more students at a higher level of academic quality and with more consideration for the taxpayer than any other state.

This is the fourth major review of the master plan. The previous three--after the investigators discovered what the master plan really was--decided not to change it. They made some alterations in the peripheral aspects, but they let the principle of differentiation of function strictly alone. I hope very much that this will be the decision of this review commission--unless, of course, they want to limit access, thin out academic quality, and strain the fiscal resources of the taxpayers of California.

There are some fields in which the California State University has graduate faculty, resources, and facilities superior to UC’s. The way we solved that problem was by the joint doctoral program, in which UC and CSU worked together to offer excellent cooperative advanced degrees. If it is decided that the CSU should offer stand-alone doctorates in certain fields, as has recently been proposed, then the best way to preserve the master plan would be to have the Post Secondary Commission assume the responsibility of approving all new doctoral programs in both UC and CSU.

UC will clearly not like this procedure, but the faculties of CSU come from the same academic sources and are of equivalent quality to UC’s. They do not have the same number of Nobel laureates because they have deliberately not emphasized research but have concentrated on teaching. But their competence is such that they should not have to ask UC’s permission to offer advanced degrees. That decision should be made by a third party.

The current joint doctoral program has worked quite well. If it is changed, care must be taken not to destroy the differentiation of function principle, which has been emulated both nationally and internationally because of the results it has produced.

GLENN DUMKE

Chancellor Emeritus

The California State University

Encino