A Two-Tier UC Is in No One’s Interest

Surging enrollment has aroused public concern over the balance between the University of California’s two principal missions: teaching and research. It has provoked several suggestions. The most general is an across-the-board shift in priorities from research to teaching. The most radical is creating a two-tier institution in which Berkeley and UCLA are assigned primarily the research function and the other general campuses the undergraduate teaching function. The latter proposal is intended to keep UC competitive with the nation’s other top research institutions, while also making it competitive with leading liberal-arts colleges. Both suggestions are impracticable for at least four daunting reasons.

-- Cost feasibility and student/faculty ratios. Undergraduates at the best liberal-arts colleges get more interaction with faculty, and they pay for it. At Claremont McKenna (according to Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges) there is one faculty member for every nine students. At Swarthmore the ratio is 1 to 10. At UC the ratio is 1 to 19. Suppose UC professors were to “starve” research and graduate teaching and put, say, 70% their time into undergraduate teaching. Even at that experimentally skewed distribution of work, with a 1-to-19 ratio, the UC undergraduate/faculty interaction would be just about one-third as intensive as that at a 1-to-9 ratio liberal-arts college where faculty may spend as much as 100% time on undergraduate teaching.

-- California’s economic competitiveness. To stay competitive in the high-tech world, California needs to maintain in its peak research universities (Stanford, UC, Cal Tech and USC) a faculty whose research at least matches that of the other U.S. regions with which California is competitive. California, with 27,000,000 people, really is a region (not just a state) that competes with, for example, the New York/New England region (30,000,000 people). California’s combined research faculties (public and private) need to be in the same ballpark in numbers, intellectual quality and support as the combination of New York/New England’s best (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Rochester and the major SUNY and CUNY campuses). Viewed in this way UC is by no means too richly research-oriented.

-- Waste of past investments in the UC system . “Two-tiering” UC might have been practically achievable a generation ago when the developing campuses were on the drawing boards and only the UCLA and Berkeley general campuses had significant national reputations. However, the various UC campuses are far more comparable in terms of standing than they were 25 years ago. One indicator of this is the level of research funding granted UC by the federal government. This is research funding that comes essentially from “peer judgments” by other professors across American higher education as to where the really important research in (chiefly) the hard sciences and medicine is being done.

A generation ago only UCLA and Berkeley were nationally significant recipients. Figures published last year, however, showed seven of the nine UC campuses on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of “Top 100 Institutions.” San Diego and San Francisco came in first and third among UC campuses, with UCLA second and Berkeley fourth.

Currently at UC San Diego there are five Nobel Prize winners and 48 members of the National Academy of Sciences. At UCLA there are two Nobel Prize winners and 32 members of the National Academy of Sciences. Given figures like this, it makes no sense, surely, to ask San Diego faculty to put research second and UCLA faculty to put it first.

-- Value of undergraduate degrees and affirmative-action goals. Studies indicate that the lifetime earning power of degrees is higher the stronger a campus’s reputation. In the past 25 years, what might be called the “market value” of undergraduate degrees from the newer UC campuses have converged, so that a degree from, say, Irvine is today nearly as “valuable” as one from UCLA. A two-tier UC would reverse this convergence. Such reversal would play havoc with affirmative-action efforts. It would force ever more fierce competition for admissions at the “most prestigious” campuses. The largely successful effort of the past 25 years to enable all UC campuses to achieve high national standing provides at least some chance for minority and low-income students to gain “high value” educational opportunities that are close to home and relatively affordable.

To fit with California’s societal needs, the developmental paths of UC campuses need to be converging, not diverging. This does not mean all need be identical. Nor does it mean that nothing can be done to improve the quality of UC undergraduate education. Far from it. Here are three possibilities.

The first would be a long-run target of enriching the student-faculty ratio, not to the prohibitively expensive ratios of Harvey Mudd or Princeton, but more modestly toward the levels of good public research universities known also for their undergraduate education--for example, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the ratio is 1 to 12.

Second would be to reconsider the relative weights used by UC in determining how many faculty positions go to each campus. Currently, intercampus allocations are governed by a “weighted ratio.” Upper-division undergraduates, for example, count for 50% more per head than lower-division undergraduates do and graduate students as much as 200% more. It’s not obvious that these are the right relative weights--e.g., that two “gentleman’s C” juniors should count as much as three eager but marginally prepared freshmen.

Third would be a cost-free change in the faculty evaluation system. UC faculty are rigorously reviewed for merit more frequently than at almost any other major university. That’s fine. But, at each review, even though teaching and research are in theory equal, and the research often strengthens teaching, research tends to dominate. Suppose, then, that a policy were adopted that regularly alternated teaching and research as the dominant criterion of evaluation.

A wide public debate about improving the effectiveness of undergraduate higher education in the University of California would be very desirable. But proposals that “better teaching” can be achieved by reducing investment in high-quality research will inevitably miss their target. What’s needed are serious efforts to fully fund and reward the excellent undergraduate teaching to which the university now claims to aspire.