A UC for all

As a way of closing California’s $41-billion budget shortfall, admitting more out-of-state applicants to the University of California system seems almost quaint. Even if every one of the system’s 220,000 students paid $150,000 toward the state’s shortfall, it still wouldn’t staunch the red ink.

But the idea is being floated nonetheless, and it’s hard not to take it seriously. In a year when elementary schools may close, when the school year may be shortened, when parks may be shut down, when the poorest residents may lose healthcare, it’s certainly conceivable that a few Californians might have to lose their spots in the university system to students from elsewhere, because out-of-state tuition is higher than that charged to residents. Currently, about 6% of UC undergraduates are non-Californians.

Though this move won’t solve the budget mess, it’s worth considering anyway. For generations, the University of California has served as the intellectual core of this state and as an agent of social and economic mobility. From its earliest years, the system was coeducational, serving this state more completely than many universities elsewhere. Educators and astronauts; governors, members of Congress and a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; athletes, actors and authors -- all have passed through its halls and plazas, taken its blessings into the world and achieved greatness. The University of California taught Jackie Robinson and Earl Warren, Alice Waters and Joan Didion, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Antonio Villaraigosa.

But the system never existed merely to educate Californians. It serves more broadly to advance the intellectual and cultural life of California, not just by educating its sons and daughters but by drawing others here.

Indeed, the admissions debate is less about the budget than about identity, a fact exquisitely highlighted by news that even as the state considers admitting more nonresidents, the California Supreme Court will soon hear arguments on whether students who are here illegally may pay in-state tuition to attend state colleges and universities. Are those students properly thought of as Californians, because they live here, or out-of-state residents, because they arrived under unorthodox circumstances?

We opt for the broadest definition of “Californian” and hope that the state will continue to educate as many young people as it can, drawn from the widest possible area, mindful of its budgetary troubles but not constrained by them. California did not become the expansive and prosperous place it is by shutting its borders.