Turning Point for Higher Ed?

The sequence of events has been, to say the least, unfortunate. Last month, an internal audit at the California State University uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars lost by mismanagement. The day after that news broke, a committee of CSU trustees recommended that the salaries of CSU campus presidents be increased. Finally, on Friday of last week, both the CSU and UC systems proposed new fee hikes of $342 to $650 per year. CSU also announced that, in effect, it can no longer guarantee admission to the top one-third of California high school graduates. As for UC, it foresees several more years of annual $650 hikes.

Better-paid presidents might well save CSU more than they would cost. Their average pay of $120,075 compares with an average of $145,000 at comparable state systems elsewhere in the United States. The mentioned internal audit noted that the number of administrators at Cal State San Diego has remained the same while the campus’ construction budget rose from $191 million in 1989 to nearly $737 million in 1992. Oversight of a budget that big costs money, but it is often money well spent. It might, for example, have spared CSU the loss of $800,000 in unclaimed penalties from contractors who missed their construction deadlines.

But the bigger issue is fees. Since 1989, they have more than doubled at both UC and CSU; as a provocative poll published by the California Higher Education Policy Center makes clear, unending fee hikes are rapidly eroding California’s confidence in its higher education Establishment. Among the poll’s findings: 52% of Californians think many qualified applicants are already turned away; 67% believe access has shrunk over the last 10 years; 73% believe it will shrink further in the future. Probably as a result, 64% in California--as against 54% nationwide--support a fundamental overhaul of higher education.

What would an overhaul look like? Suffice it to say that it would entail radical change within the institutions themselves, as distinct from preserving them essentially unchanged by allowing tuition to rise rapidly while enrollment gradually shrinks. Californians are losing their patience with that solution and may be readier than generally recognized for very different solutions. Higher education will ignore this change in the public mood at its growing peril.