Promise Keepers?

For the last four decades, the state of California has touted higher education as the great equalizer: For the poor, a door to the world of ideas and a better life; for late-bloomers, a sense of purpose and direction; for smart kids, a push toward the boundaries of discovery. We promised that dream to anyone who wanted to pursue it, no matter their race or ethnic background.

But with a new century approaching, California is on the verge of breaking that promise.

A huge wave of new students, the children of the Baby Boom generation, is hurtling toward college and facing a series of unprecedented challenges: What courses will be offered, what technologies will be used, what will it all cost? But none of these issues has the urgency of this one:

Where are we going to put all those students?

Answering that question would cost billions, and state leaders say they cannot afford to deal with it. But how can they afford not to? Thirty years ago, a high school diploma was still a ticket to the middle class. Now you need at least a couple of years of college to stay even with the game. Just try to buy a house in the suburbs on a job where your muscles get more exercise than your brain.

Will California figure out a way to meet its promise by 2005, when the wave will hit? What’s at stake is the very future of our state--and the lives of four sixth-graders we profile below.

*

We find Deandre in an inner-city school in Los Angeles. He’s pleading with big eyes for permission to take home the novel being read aloud in class. There aren’t enough copies for all the sixth-graders, a scenario that is sadly familiar in the Los Angeles Unified School District, so the books are supposed to stay in Room 288, where they can be shared. Yet Deandre knows that improving his reading means working at it, so he’s willing to lobby for special consideration. His diligence encourages his mother. Just maybe, she says, his life will be different: First go to college, then start a family. But will the poor quality of California’s public school system trip him up before he can even start?

We catch up with Anjali at a math tutorial center in Encino, her mind racing against the clock. The pencil has trouble keeping up as she hopscotches through quadratic equations. She does these timed math drills every day for one overarching reason: Admission to the Ivy League. But with all of the brainy kids chasing limited seats in a few prestigious schools, will she get to pursue her dream as a research scientist?

On any given day, Elliot can be found at his usual spot in his North Hollywood home--on the sofa in front of the TV. College remains as far from Elliot’s mind as the evening’s social studies homework. All of his attention is focused on the rock ‘em, sock ‘em action that gallops across his Nintendo Game Boy. His dad figures he can live with Elliot’s less-than-academic pursuits. The boy can always follow in his dad’s footsteps: go to a community college to sort things out. But will these schools have room for all the late bloomers?

Finally, we encounter Jaqui baking cupcakes for her classmates in her little school in Chavez Ravine. She likes school well enough, getting mostly A’s and B’s. But college? She used to shudder at the idea. It was, after all, an unfamiliar, scary place, impossibly far from her mom. Then her school invited her to swap e-mail with a Cal State Fullerton student. After visiting the dorms and trading Beanie Babies with her pen pal, college seems, well, “like fun.” And it will be--if we can ensure that California honors its promise of higher education to all residents, even if the racial mix is very different from the past.

These four students are riding a tidal wave of extra kids--455,000 in California alone--who are expected to slam into the nation’s colleges and universities in 2005.

And while the enrollment surge is a national phenomenon, trend-setting California, as usual, faces the biggest crunch. The last time the state’s colleges were so deluged, California’s leaders developed a “Master Plan”--a blueprint that guaranteed a college education to all its citizens and became a model for the nation. Back in the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers reached college age, the state built five University of California campuses--Irvine, Davis, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. It opened five California State University campuses in Northridge, Fullerton and elsewhere, and 32 community colleges.

No such building boom is in the works now that the children of Baby Boomers are coming of age. Of course, the Boomlet is only about half the size of the Boom, but even that seems to be too much to deal with for a state government that has evolved from the farsighted planning of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the myopic crisis-management of the ‘90s.

The new campuses opening--a UC near Merced, and Cal State Camarillo and Monterey Bay--don’t come close to the approaching need. The state’s public and private colleges say they can collectively absorb 160,000 additional students. The remaining 295,000? No one knows.

As for a master plan?

This time around, no one outside of academia is paying much attention. Listen to Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education:

“It’s not that California has a bad plan. It’s that it has no plan at all.”

*

Or maybe it does. Perhaps california has a plan that no one wants to talk about: If the state’s public schools stay lousy enough, no one will need to worry about a tidal wave of new college applicants.

The majority of experts see a surge coming. But Samuel M. Kipp, former director of the California Student Aid Commission, fears it will be a wave of disappointment.

Minority and low-income students--the new majority of California schoolchildren--attend many of the worst schools. They drop out more and attend college less than middle-class whites, thereby prompting a gloomy prediction from Kipp: “High hopes, exhortations and good intentions will not succeed in breaking these patterns.”

Deandre Frison could stand as a test case. His future, like that of many of his classmates, may depend in large part on a roll of the dice.

It’s not for lack of trying. Long after most of his classmates have gone home, Deandre stays at the Foshay Learning Center near USC to work on his movie. It’s more of a short video, really, the culmination of the semester’s after-school program to help sixth-graders improve their writing, ignite their creativity and make them more media-savvy.

Problem is, the class is out of control. Victor sneaks up behind Jose, pulls his ears and scoots out of the room. A lanky girl nicknamed Chilly scribbles with abandon on the blackboard. Another 11-year-old shrieks, just to test her lungs. “Come on guys,” says a volunteer, trying to hold things together. The commotion only grows louder.

Amazingly, Deandre stays on course, intently coloring the backdrop to his teleplay. He wrote the script, a compact tale about good versus evil. He picked the puppets as his stars. Now, he’s ready to narrate the action when it’s his turn before the video camera in the room next door. Another student careens by, knocking over a Styrofoam cup. Deandre returns it upright, restoring order to his little corner of this chaos.

Deandre, who gets middling grades, has caught the attention of his teacher, not an easy task in a team-taught class of 66 fidgeting sixth-graders. And so, of course, she relented when he asked to take home a copy of Gary Paulsen’s “Hatchet,” a novel about a boy’s experience in the wilderness as the lone survivor of a plane crash.

“He was going to see his dad,” Deandre explains, caressing the book like a precious gift. His class has just finished reading the novel aloud in school, but he wants to go through it again. “I want to make my reading better.”

His mother, Adrianne Green, is as supportive as she can be for a single mom raising four sons, juggling two part-time jobs and enrolled in school full time at Los Angeles Southwest College’s nursing program.

She embraces college like a religious convert, trying “to impress upon all of my sons that the only way to make it is through education . . . before becoming fathers and husbands.”

But Deandre cannot rely only on his devotion and hard work. Much of his educational future depends on where he goes to high school. Foshay has a large population of middle-school students. But the high school is limited to 600, and Deandre’s fate, along with hundreds of other kids, will be determined by lottery.

If chosen, he will remain at Foshay, which has become a model for academic achievement among inner-city youth: 95% graduate from Foshay and 94% go on to college.

If not, he’s likely to end up at Manual Arts High School--a more typical inner-city school of nearly 4,000. Only a third of its students make it to graduation. Of those, a little more than half go on to college.

Foshay Principal Howard Lappin has a simple philosophy for success: His students do not get lost in the crowd and can’t escape the message that they will go to college.

“I know full well that every kid isn’t going to college,” he says. “But they won’t hear that from us. All these kids need is someone to say, ‘Yes, we believe in you. We will keep pushing you.’ ”

*

The pencil suddenly comes to a halt in Anjali Tripathi’s hand. She glowers at her work, a triple-decked algebraic equation. “Forget it,” she says to herself, reaching for the eraser. “Just use the formula. Don’t take chances.”

When the last math problem is done, she checks the time. Self-satisfaction spreads across her face. She beat the clock. Not bad for a 10-year-old tackling work usually done by high school juniors.

A final hurdle remains, though. Getting her work graded by the no-nonsense woman at the front desk. Dressed in a parochial school uniform, Anjali stomps across the floor of Encino’s Kumon Learning Center, exaggerating the effort of each step.

Ms. No-Nonsense whips through the pages, marking them with red ink. Five errors. “Fix it and bring it back to me,” she says, handing the papers back. Anjali squirms. Then she does as she’s told. After all, this is her mom.

No worries here about her not getting pushed.

Remember those parents who first camped out on lawn chairs to get their toddlers in the “right” preschool? Well, those toddlers are now heading toward college.

If one crucial question facing higher education is how to cope with students drowning in substandard public schools, this is the flip side: How to handle the frenzied competition among those who are succeeding.

“It’s simply not true that there are only 15 or 20 colleges or universities that a person can attend and have a meaningful and happy life,” says Bob Laird, admissions director for UC Berkeley.

But even as he says the words, he knows he is being ignored. “We’ve all been saying this for some time, with zero impact.”

For now, with relatively small classes graduating from high school, the nation has plenty of college seats for everyone. But the schools at the top turn away record numbers every year. Berkeley and UCLA-- state universities designed to be accessible to the public--turned away two-thirds of those who wanted to enroll as freshmen last fall.

UC admissions officers like to duck when asked how high the percentage of rejected applicants might go. But if current trends continue, Berkeley and UCLA could easily turn away 85% or more of those seeking admission.

Mindful of the competition, it was an easy decision for Clara Lu Tripathi to give up her lucrative career in computers at the Bank of America to open her own Kumon Learning Center. She did it for Anjali. The Japanese-modeled tutorial center demands its pupils do timed math drills every day to build their confidence and give them an edge.

This full-time Kumon mom wants her only child to make it to the Ivy League--a dream she herself could not attain as a graduate student from Taiwan. So Clara Tripathi pushes an academic formula to help her daughter excel: Private school since before kindergarten. Daily math drills and tutoring. Towering trophies from math competitions get prominent display in their Woodland Hills home.

The warnings of one prep-school headmaster haunt her. “There are lots and lots of brilliant students like Anjali. You have to stand out,” she recounts him saying. “So we are getting her to do all of these things to get her ready. She has been playing piano since she was 6. You have to be good in at least one sport. So she goes to swim team every Monday.”

Anjali’s father, Amit Tripathi, worries that his daughter is taking on too much. Her mother shrugs off such concerns. Anjali is self-motivated, she says. It’s been some time, after all, since she would raise an objection, saying, “Mommy, I’m only a kid once. I want to have happy childhood memories.”

Kumon Learning Centers are filled with the academic equivalent of stage mothers. Such centers, either by Kumon, Sylvan or other names, are popping up all over California to feed a hunger for scholastic success.

And while it is usually the lure of the top private colleges that drives the frenzy, some of the biggest impact hits California’s elite public universities.

The reason becomes obvious as Amit Tripathi taps into the Internet on his home computer.

The all-inclusive cost of attending Yale--tuition, room and board, books, incidentals--has now jumped to $33,300 per year, he finds. He types that number into a calculator on a Web site provided by financial aid counselors, factors in 5% inflation and projects the total cost for putting Anjali through four years of the Ivy League: $192,340.

“Oh my God. It’s that much?”

Then he repeats the exercise, this time using UCLA’s all-inclusive cost of $14,176. The projected four-year cost: $78,979. “Much better,” he says. “That would be possible.”

That kind of reaction is driving up the number of high-achieving students who are applying to the University of California.

Average SAT scores for Berkeley’s freshmen leaped to 1,390 last fall, up from 1,336 the year before, when affirmative action was still legal. The average high school grade point average was 4.27--a numerical possibility because UC allows 5 points for an A in an advanced placement or honors courses. For UCLA freshmen, it was a 4.08 GPA and 1,272 SAT.

With the number of applicants rising, no one knows how high those averages can soar. Of course, it’s flattering for university leaders to have each freshman class arrive with more impressive credentials than the last. But it worries them, too, because these are schools that were designed to be accessible to the masses.

The public, which often views elite private colleges with a sense of awe, can quickly turn angry when taxpayer-supported institutions become so exclusive. UC officials fear a backlash.

“It’s terrible to turn away 22,000 students,” says UCLA admissions director Rae Lee Siporin. “It’s spinning out of control.”

But the premier institutions have no real plan for getting the situation back under control. They certainly have no intention of admitting more students, given the widespread belief that universities much larger than 30,000 students are too unwieldy to manage, too big to deliver a quality education.

Indeed, their main hope is that the public will change, rather than the university. Middle-class Californians--many of them UC alumni--will just have to adjust to the notion that campuses like UCLA and Berkeley will no longer have room for the run-of-the mill good student. “That person,” says Siporin--the kid who, while not a stellar scholar, has taken all the right honors and Advanced Placement courses in high school--”ought to go to Cal State.”

*

For a brief moment, and only a brief moment, the Karlins’ chaotic house is silent. The TV goes mute. No one’s talking. The only sound is the soft trill and chirp of the Nintendo Game Boy in Elliot’s lap.

The atmospheric shift snaps Elliot out of his cyber world. He looks up at the TV, grabs the remote, clicks to another channel. Then, just as he settles back into his life’s biggest joy, sending his Pokeman warriors into cyber battle, the question: “Have you done your homework?”

“Didn’t have any homework today,” he responds. The answer seems to satisfy. He and his warriors never break stride.

Beth Karlin sighs at the sight of this skinny boy with prominent ears: “He’s your typical over-bright underachiever.”

Elliot is a good kid with a wry sense of humor, but he hardly shrinks from this assessment. “It’s true,” he volunteers. “I’m lazy. Anything that’s a chore, I don’t like.”

Beth and Bob Karlin do what they can to motivate their straight C student. They got him into Walter Reed Middle School, a place with thriving programs for gifted students. When he does good work, they post it on the fridge. They try reverse psychology: Place a how-do-things-work book on the coffee table, but never ask him to read it. So he does.

But at least for now, Bob Karlin is not all that concerned about his son’s enrolling in a four-year college straight out of high school.

“I could see Elliot going to a community college,” Bob Karlin says, “as somebody who gets out of high school and doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life. The community college is quite good for that kind of thing.”

After all, community college worked for Bob Karlin, setting him on a career path to becoming a successful computer consultant. But that was a generation ago.

A generation ago, high school graduates had other options than college. Most jobs didn’t require any higher education. Today, seven out of 10 jobs require at least some college-level training, a ratio expected to rise as the economic gears continue to shift from low- to high-tech.

And the state’s 106 community colleges are expected to swallow the bulk of the tidal wave, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 students. No one is sure how they’ll line up the money to offer the extra classes.

Already the system is feeling the strain of competing demands: Technical training for jobs ranging from auto mechanic to licensed vocational nurse; helping people move off welfare rolls and into the workplace; teaching English as a second language, offering late-bloomers the general education courses they need to enroll in a university.

These two-year colleges never turn away students the way four-year universities do. The choke point comes during registration. Some students get classes; others do not.

So will Elliot and thousands of other students end up roaming from campus to campus, hoping to find a computer science course or an American history class that isn’t full? How many semesters of that does a student have to take before getting discouraged and quitting?

Thomas J. Nussbaum, chancellor of the community college system, sees no indication that the state will be able to pay for the classes it will need by 2005.

At Cal State and the University of California, the situation is only slightly better. All three systems lack the classrooms, dorms or other facilities they will need.

Many college campuses do have theoretical room for expansion, but most construction dollars have been gobbled up by deferred maintenance and the need to fortify existing buildings to meet earthquake safety standards.

So state colleges--especially the community colleges and Cal State campuses--will have to get creative: More classes will have to be held at night, on weekends and at high schools. Some advocate switching from the traditional nine-month academic calendar of two 18-week semesters to year-round operation of three 16-week semesters.

“The whole trick is going to be to change the culture and incentives,” says Cal State’s Chancellor Reed. That means coaxing students and, yes, faculty to give up their cherished summer break. He has begun to float a modest proposal for Cal State professors who perennially complain about low pay. “We’ll pay you more, if you’ll work more,” he says, as in 12 months a year like other working stiffs.

Reed also wants to persuade 15% of Cal State students to take courses over the Internet, or all students to take one out of five classes online. That should help relieve some crowding on campus. Community college leaders also talk up the potential of online courses as an inexpensive way to reach more students. The classes offered online are already growing exponentially.

But so far, the technology remains balky and those who could benefit the most--poor and minority students--are least likely to have a computer at home connected to the Internet. It’s only a matter of time until both improve--or so university administrators hope.

Wall Street, too, may change the equation. Many financiers see the expected increase in college enrollments as an exploitable niche. Traditional colleges and universities are costly and inefficient enterprises that don’t care about their customers, they say. Already, a new breed of private, or proprietary schools with names like DeVry Institutes and Jones International University (owned by a large cable television company) have joined the collegiate ranks. The University of Phoenix has seemingly risen overnight as the nation’s largest private university with 56,000 students.

But private start-up companies want to attract those who can pay, or at least those who can scrounge together enough financial aid. They do not intend to supplant the role of community colleges, or even public universities, to provide classes at a bargain rate--thanks to taxpayer subsidies.

So much of the burden of educating the poor--or providing a place for the wayward children of the middle class to sort out their lives--will fall on government’s shoulders. And no one is sure how California can afford it.

As the state’s budget has evolved, most tax dollars are divvied up by state or federal formulas: This amount for welfare and other social services, that amount for public K-12 schools. Of what’s left over, higher education gets about half, usually after a wrestling match with the Department of Corrections.

Over the last 30 years, the higher education portion of the state budget has shrunk--not dramatically, but steadily. The system has made up much of the loss by increasing student fees.

And even though the state has already been through the nation’s biggest prison construction boom, prison populations are continuing to go up. The money battle pitting prisons against higher education is unlikely to stop.

USC economist Morton Owen Schapiro only half jokes that prison growth is California’s new master plan for higher education. “The horrible thing is that it could be a self-fulfilling prophesy,” he says. “If we don’t invest in community colleges and technical training, corrections could be filling its beds.”

*

As if these problems were not enough to keep academic administrators busy, the University of California faces another potentially explosive issue: It is an institution of mostly white and Asian American students in an increasingly Latino state.

Only about 12% of UC’s freshman class is Latino, and 3% African American.

And yet these two groups will make up a majority of the state’s schoolchildren beginning next year and will account for 60% of all California high school graduates by 2006.

So it’s with good reason that UC officials worry about how their student body fails to reflect the complexion of the state’s population. The demographic shift is political dynamite.

Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa makes clear the expectations of California’s emerging Latino majority. “It is the university’s job to open up to kids like me,” says Villaraigosa, who graduated from UCLA.

And if that doesn’t happen? “The Legislature,” Villaraigosa says, “has to make sure UC is a place where our kids have an opportunity to attend.” The University of California is guaranteed autonomy by the state Constitution. But the Legislature holds its purse strings. How this gets played out could turn ugly.

Since it banned affirmative action in 1997, the University of California’s answer to this challenge has been to redouble its “outreach” programs. On a recent Saturday morning, a rented school bus rumbled into the parking lot at John Muir Middle School in South-Central Los Angeles to pick up Lafayette Grier and three other sixth-graders.

The morning had been carefully planned, a mix of facts and fun. The students from John Muir and a half-dozen other urban schools would attend one seminar to boost their self-esteem, another to learn what classes they would need to get on track for college. And then they would learn more about UCLA by joining a scavenger hunt on campus.

The bus broke down on the Harbor Freeway.

Arriving an hour and a half late, the kids had to race through the seminars. One college official was a no-show, forcing a high school counselor to wing it as the seminar leader. And someone forgot to bring the treasures for the scavenger hunt.

Everyone has the best of intentions. The high school counselors volunteered to give up their Saturday to encourage these students. And Lafayette loved wolfing down slice after slice of pepperoni pizza. “This is the college I’m going to, for sure,” he says between mouthfuls at a pizza joint on campus.

But the day’s lesson remained: It’s a long bus ride from John Muir Middle School to UCLA.

The road seems shorter, somehow, between an elementary school in a working-class Latino community in Los Angeles and a Cal State campus in Orange County.

Using one finger, Jaqui Arredondo pecks away at the keyboard, extra careful not to hit a key that would make the e-mail vanish, or worse, ruin the whole computer. Sure, it’s a little scary. But she’s done this before, swapping secrets with her collegiate pen pal. Like the time she wrote about her “big crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie star. I think he is so cute. I love him very much.”

That was when she was in fifth grade, though. Now that she’s a wise sixth-grader, Leo is, well, yech. Her attitude toward college has shifted too.

“I thought it was kind of scary. ‘No, Ma, I don’t want to leave you.’ But now, as I get older, OK, I want to get on with my life.”

Jaqui is part of another outreach program. Academics refer to Mika Tochikubo, a Cal State Fullerton student, as Jaqui’s “literacy partner.” Jaqui simply calls her a friend. Whatever the label, Tochikubo is one of 25 college students paired with fifth and sixth-graders at Solano Elementary School to inspire them to read and write, and perhaps consider college as something within reach.

“Most of our kids don’t know what college is,” says John Stoll, principal of the school, where 94% of students qualify for free lunches. “They cannot wait until they are juniors or seniors to start thinking about it or they are going to be shut out.”

So Jaqui trundled across Cal State Fullerton with her classmates for a picnic with their mentors. They played jump rope. They got a peek at life in the dorms. They watched with big eyes as someone in a white anatomy lab coat picked up a real human brain.

All this has given Jaqui plenty to write about. And Tochikubo has been impressed how this shy, bespectacled girl with long brown hair and round cheeks has opened up.

Perhaps Jaqui was easier to persuade than some of her classmates. Her mom, a speech pathologist at a school, went to Cal State L.A. Although her dad didn’t make it to college--”I was a father at 18 years old”--he insists that his children will.

But if she pursues a higher education at, say, Cal State Fullerton, will there be room? Already two Cal State campuses--San Luis Obispo and San Diego--are considered “impacted,” meaning they can close registration early and turn away qualified students. Other popular campuses are expected to go the same route as they are swarmed by a surplus of students.

Studies show that outreach programs can work, particularly when they target specific students. But these well-meaning programs have been around since the late ‘60s. The results are always the same: They reach only a small number.

“These programs are just Band-Aids,” says Callan, the president of the national higher education think tank.

Higher education has long been valued as a place where someone can set his or her own destiny. But it doesn’t always play out that way on a grand scale. About 80% of the children of affluent families go on to college and half of them to prestigious colleges or universities, while only about 25% of the poor go on to college and a tenth of them to a prestigious school.

“When higher education is another force of economic stratification, then this society is in real trouble,” USC’s Schapiro says.

Stephen Carroll, an economist at RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, also frets about the widening education gap. Blacks and Latinos are less than half as likely to make it through college as whites and Asian Americans. Then they go on to earn less than half of their comparable salaries.

The gap appears to be widening.

“We are heading toward this permanent underclass,” Carroll says. “I’m not making a plea for affirmative action. I don’t think it’s healthy to have a society where any large segments hover near poverty, no matter who they are.”

Deandre, Anjali, Elliot, Jaqui--each of their futures hinges on the question: Will a college education be available to California’s next generation?

So far, state leaders offer no assurances for the class of 2005, much less all the classes to follow when the tidal wave peaks in 2008 or 2009. Indeed, they would prefer to just keep putting the problem off.

Clark Kerr worries about that. When the elder statesman of higher education was UC president, he helped California ride the first tidal wave of students with the 1960 master plan.

The plan’s 40-year-old promise of a college education for all will be crushed by the second wave, he warns, unless the state acts soon.

“Every year that goes by, disaster becomes more of a reality,” Kerr says. “It’s not upon us yet, but it’s awfully close. It takes years to build facilities and get the professors in place. I hope people wake up.”