Wasting a Top Asset

The children of baby boomers are streaming onto state campuses in what educators call “Tidal Wave II,” the echo of the 1960s’ boomer flood. In the next decade, California colleges will face 700,000 students more than the 2 million they teach now. Where will these students sit? It’s not an idle question: Employers are desperate for a better-educated work force, even as more would-be students are being turned away.

In the 1960s, state leaders met anticipated demand by building five University of California campuses, five Cal State colleges and 32 community colleges. In today’s more fearful political climate, only one building project is formally on the table: a $1-billion UC campus near Merced, and that project is clouded by environmental concerns and threatened lawsuits. As Patrick M. Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, puts it: “It’s not that California has a bad plan. It’s that it has no plan at all.”

In truth, there is one sensible, if piecemeal, solution that Gov. Gray Davis could get behind now: a $33-million item in the Legislature’s new budget. It calls for expanding year-round education at four UC and Cal State campuses by reducing the higher student fees that the colleges now charge for summer sessions.

Davis, concerned about committing the state to an ongoing increase in higher education spending, has yet to support the funding. But the costs of year-round instruction are minimal compared with new campuses. California’s universities can no longer afford to shut down during the summers, although that concept will take some selling among faculties.

Last fall, an 18-member legislative committee began seeking ways to keep the promise that California made under a landmark 1960 master plan: that all “interested students” shall have access to affordable, high-quality college education.

No specific plan has emerged from the committee, and colleges are hitting a demographic wall. The master plan may guarantee that Cal State colleges will accept the top one-third of high school graduates, but trustees are already allowing overcrowded campuses to bar qualified students.

Some of Cal State’s new admission restrictions make academic sense, like Chancellor Charles B. Reed’s decision last year to boot about 5% of the system’s freshman class out of the system, telling the students not to come back until they had the required English and math skills. But tougher admission standards shouldn’t be the state’s only effective policy response to Tidal Wave II.

Leaders in Sacramento should push through the funding for year-round classes and keep seeking inventive ways to accommodate additional students. One such way is Cal State Teach, an 18-month program in which public school teachers with emergency credentials can gain permanent credentials online or in satellite classrooms.

Overcrowding is the enemy of equal access to higher education. Currently, about 80% of the children of affluent families go on to college in California, compared with only about one-quarter of the poor, a disproportion that will worsen as admission standards based on grades and test scores are tightened.

Rather than hiding behind high-minded, procrastinating committees, legislators should help colleges educate all willing and able students, just as the state promised and as businesses so plainly need.