Battling the Numbers on California Campuses : Education: Do we need new colleges and universities? How many, and where? California faces some crucial long-term policy decisions.

When earthquakes physical and political dominate the news, the matter of building new college campuses may seem small potatoes. That’s why the recent decision by University of California regents to locate a new campus in the central part of the state played the back pages--except in places near possible sites.

But the stakes in campus siting are hardly small. And the politics are far from academic. Decisions on campus growth and location reflect tough policy choices California government must face over the next decade:

Who will have access to higher (“postsecondary”) education?

Who will benefit from decisions on where to put new campuses?

Who will pay for the implementation of these decisions?

Public higher education--the nine campuses of the University of California, the 19 campuses of the California State University system and the 107 California Community College campuses--is big business (a combined budget total of $7.12 billion for 1989-90) and big-time politics.

California has had a historical commitment of access for all qualified citizens to its state-supported system of higher education. The strength of that commitment has fluctuated over the years as governors, legislatures, financial and political realities have changed.

The 1950s were a time of growth in California. With growth came clashes over who should control the state’s public colleges and universities. Competition and duplication developed among them. Educators and legislators alike demanded new campuses.

In response, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education was adopted during Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown’s Administration. Within the next decade, the system grew from 84 public institutions to 116 and total enrollment more than doubled.

During the mid-’60s, Gov. Ronald Reagan vowed to “cut, squeeze and trim” the costs of government. California’s higher-education system was among those state programs he targeted.

Some critics insisted that Reagan’s successor, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., seemed intent on dismantling--brick by brick--the mammoth system his father helped build.

Gov. George Deukmejian refocused on educational needs, within the limited framework of his own spending priorities and his pledge of “no new taxes.”

But suddenly the governor and Legislature--not to mention university and college budgeteers--ran smack into the Gann spending limits, enacted in 1979. Then in 1988 came Proposition 98, which earmarked 40% of available state funding for public schools and community colleges.

Today, the once highly protected UC and its less secure stepsister, the Cal State system, find themselves whipsawed by contrary political mandates: equal access to higher education and voter-imposed spending restraints.

The California Postsecondary Education Commission, charged with the task of providing the governor and Legislature with nonpartisan policy analysis, recently issued a report entitled “Higher Education at the Crossroads,” concluding that to meet increased post-secondary enrollment projections, “all segments will need to expand existing campuses and plan new ones.”

However, it recommended only one additional UC campus--not three, as the university originally projected. And where the Cal State system proposed five new campuses, the commission held that “enrollment projections used by the State University make its plan for new campuses open to question.” The disparities are not merely the result of statistical disagreement. They reflect differing fiscal and political assumptions. They test the notion--and the reality--of equal access to education in this state.

The university projection of “up to three” new campuses--one each in the north, south and central regions--was nice strategy. Astute political bargaining requires that you ask for more than you minimally need; that makes it easier to get something out of the inevitable compromise.

In addition, although Central California--whether Fresno or some point north or south of it--appears to have won the prize this time (and it is due, having no UC campus of its own and the lowest UC enrollment), there remains more largess to dangle. Educators and politicians in Northern and Southern California can hope that, if they go along with the location of this campus, their area might get the next one.

If the campus estimate was politically shrewd, so were the enrollment assumptions that led to it. Under the university’s formula, growth means an increase in graduate students--and that translates into increases in faculty and research. “That way,” said one observer, “all the existing chancellors . . . are comfortable with growth.”

UC’s graduate recruitment pool, however, is national and international. A percentage of qualified Californians applying for undergraduate status could find themselves locked out of the campus of their choice. That is already happening at Berkeley and UCLA and has led to increased racial tension.

The same holds true for undergraduate affirmative-action programs. Qualified Anglo and Asian students perceive themselves as being passed over for less-qualified minorities, while blacks and Latinos lobby for a more representative presence.

The concept of “educational equity” between minority and white students plays a role in the debate over the Cal State system’s projected need for five new campuses. These projections rest on enrollment estimates that State Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill labeled “unrealistically high.” They appear to be based on what the post-secondary commission’s report called “hopes rather than actual trends regarding increases in college going among underrepresented students.”

The “educational equity” that Cal State assumes will simply not happen unless K-12 education is strengthened and current achievement gaps between black and Latino students, on one hand, and Anglo and Asian students, on the other, are closed. That is a long way away.

Until then, “educational equity” may have to depend on other factors than achievement to diversify enrollments without expanding totals. This “allocation of scarcity” requires hard choices. And today those choices must be made in a volatile political climate in which support for affirmative action is weakened.

California leaders could get around these sticky decisions by simply making room for everyone who wants a post-secondary education. If everybody gets to go, there will be no civil war over quotas.

But that approach would ignore the state’s current political and fiscal realities.

Growth policies and environmental issues are at the forefront of the 1990 gubernatorial campaign. They are also at the heart of campus siting.

There are alternatives. But the development of year-round programs on existing campuses has already met stiff resistance and some failure. Shared facilities between the three systems may make sense, if the educational and political leadership is also present to get beyond the inevitable turf wars.

Whatever the plan, more money is necessary. Under current financial constraints, the growth desired by the segments certainly can’t be funded, and even moderate growth may be a problem.

“State financing of higher education,” the post-secondary commission report argues, “does not occur in a vacuum.” Soaring costs and restrictions placed on spending mean that “higher education will be competing over the coming years with other state services for limited funds.”

The passage this June of a measure to raise the Gann limits would mitigate the problem. But, the commission warns, the rate of growth of state services could push the state “up against the limit” in another 10 years.

Some analysts suggest charging full tuition, particularly for out-of-state and international students. Politicians have long given lip-service to retaining California’s commitment to tuition-free higher education. But the “tuition barrier” was broken long ago under the guise of steadily increasing educational “fees.”

Equal access to education could be retained by increasing student aid. But that takes money, too. Many years ago, conservative Republican Assemblyman Bud Collier proposed a “Learn, Earn and Reimburse” tuition plan. Democratic legislators wildly opposed it. As one expert put it, that might have sounded elitist “in the old days--in these days it may be the only way you survive.”

What may seem a simple bureaucratic decision about where to build a new campus carries a message for all Californians: We need to rethink several clashing tenets of state government.

Do we still want government to guarantee equal access to higher education for our citizens?

Are we still committed to the goal of quality post-secondary education?

Do we insist on retaining current state spending restraints?

Should we continue to demand “no new taxes”?

To con ourselves into thinking California can embrace all these priorities is, at best, naive. People who believe that’s possible are, as one policy analyst put it, “1950s thinkers in a 1990s world.”

There are undeniably hard choices to be made. Not only is higher education “at the crossroads”--so is California.