Higher Education: Staying Afloat in a ‘Tidal Wave’ : Enrollment surge will demand leadership and a new plan

In 1960, when most of California’s public needs seemed open to legislative solution, University of California President Clark Kerr drafted a master plan to accommodate the baby boomers who would soon be knocking on college doors. Kerr’s vision, crafted into legislation with the help of powerful politicians like Pat Brown, enabled California to build the community college and Cal State systems, which became models of educational opportunity, and the nine-campus UC system, which came to embody academic excellence.

Now, another generation, the children of the baby boomers, is rapping on those doors. The influx, called “Tidal Wave II,” is expected to build steadily over the next 10 years. But this time there is no coalition of committed political leaders to answer the call. According to Patrick Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, “It isn’t that this state has a bad plan for accommodating the increase in student enrollment; it has no plan at all.”

The projected increase is alarming: By the year 2005, 488,000 more Californians than are enrolled now will be seeking a college education. If the state tries to meet this demand over the next decade through simply adding buildings, programs and teachers, it will have to cough up $5.2 billion beyond what it now plans to spend for higher education.

A report released recently through the policy center, a nonprofit think tank in San Jose, offers provocative suggestions on how the state can surf Tidal Wave II. Though many of its solutions have already been championed by others, the document reflects an emerging consensus among educators that Sacramento could use as the basis for a new master plan.

The center first recommends that the state scrap or delay its plans to build new campuses like UC Merced and Cal State Camarillo. These large construction projects would divert money from the more urgent task of renovating existing college campuses, whose deteriorating buildings are on average at least three decades old. The state could accommodate new students more cost-effectively, the center argues, by offering night, weekend and summer courses in the system’s many under-utilized classrooms.

The policy center’s approach is not a panacea: Its impact would be dulled by the inability of campuses to provide office space for the faculties that would be needed to teach those additional classroom hours and by the inability of some full-time students to attend the after-hours classes--two-thirds of Cal State students, for instance, work 30 hours a week or more, often in the evenings. Still, following the center’s recommendation would help the state better use its campuses.

Sacramento also ought to embrace other recommendations in the policy center report:

* To offer more advanced placement courses in high school so students would need fewer classes to graduate from college.

* To begin offering proficiency exams in college so students could gain credits by demonstrating knowledge rather than simply punching the classroom clock.

* To require “exit assessments” in which students demonstrate their learning before graduation. (This idea would not only help make colleges accountable; it would attract needed financial support from private industry by reassuring employers that the higher education system was producing a competitive work force.)

The sheer size of Tidal Wave II, however, requires bolder steps, steps that build on a consensus about the priorities and educational mission of California’s higher education system. Is cost-effectiveness the primary goal? How strongly should the state embrace “distance learning”? Callan and UC President Richard Atkinson are intrigued by the notion that one teacher can instruct students at multiple satellite facilities through computer and video technology. But are face-to-face encounters between students and teachers an indispensable part of the learning process?

For years, UC, Cal State and community college officials have been debating these ideas at periodic colloquia called the California Education Roundtable. But ideas turn into action only when a consensus emerges based on direction from Sacramento. California needs a new master plan to meet the demands of Tidal Wave II. For now, as Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz put it, “We’re operating in a tunnel. And unless there’s someone at the other end listening to us and shouting back priorities, there’s no hope of making change.”