My own view, as based on projections developed with the help of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, was published in a brief descriptive report that Joni Finney and I wrote called By Design or Default. We projected an increase of about 450,000 full-time equivalent students between the early 1990s and 2005 or 2006. We then projected the distribution of those students among the public and private, two-year and four-year institutions in the same proportions as they are distributed now. Ours was a very conservative analysis, and, as far as I know, the most conservative set of projections that anyone has made so far. We came to the conclusion that to just move the status quo model, even without capital outlay, half way through the first decade of the next century, would require either a 52 percent increase in state appropriations or an increase to about 20 percent in overall state general fund appropriations. Neither possibility is one any realist would seriously entertain.

Our conclusion brings us to a very stark reality, and one that everyone is very reluctant to face. The State of California and its institutions of higher education must choose between: (1) maintaining the current system at its current cost and serving a much smaller portion of the population; or (2) reducing the overall cost per student--not in every program or in every institution, but in the statewide aggregate. There is no scenario under which the status quo model can move into the future at its current cost. In other words, the cost of the way we are doing business now is not sustainable if we want to maintain our goals regarding access--and I have not seen any analysis to the contrary. Does that mean the state will not have to invest further in higher education? Of course not. There will have to be additional public investment. There is no free lunch for the state here. Almost half a million new students will cost money. But we are saying that there is no scenario under which the rate of investment for each student will be the same as it was in the 1970s or 1980s. So at a time when no one is going to accept a diminution in quality and expectations--in fact, expectations are going to go up--either costs will have to come down or California's goals for access will have to be sacrificed. The fact that the present cost structure and goals for access are not sustainable is difficult to accept for an enterprise like higher education, which often equates quality with high cost--as, in fact, does much of the public. If you ask people to write down the five best colleges and universities they know about, many would list the five most expensive ones. Another way of looking at our dilemma is that we are in the same boat as everyone else in American society, a society that no longer has the resources that it once had. Resources were available when the colleges and universities faced the baby boom influx. The need to expand then came during the period of the greatest increase in growth of local and state government revenues in the history of the country, a period that started in the early 1950s and continued through the late 1970s.

When the system started to hemorrhage students in the early 1990s, we at the Center were curious about how the public perceived the change. In a report for the Center called The Closing Gateway, the Public Agenda organization, based in New York, asked if the public still thought access to higher education was important--or whether the educational and political leaders responsible for declining opportunity knew something that we did not. National and state polling found that people believed, in a way that had not been apparent in earlier polls, that higher education was more important than in the past. People were putting it higher on the scale than they had a few years ago, when it did not even show up in most polls. In relation to higher education, the hot button issues for the public are access and affordability. They do not give higher education great gold stars for quality, and, in fact, they distinguish quite clearly, in many cases, between the value of the educational experience and the value of the credential. By and large, however, people are most worried about education being priced out of sight, about downsizing, and about opportunity for their children. Public Agenda conducts polls on public policy issues of all kinds throughout the country. They said that the polls on higher education looked much more like the prior year's poll on health care, minus a few degrees of intensity, than they did like polls on KŠ12 education. Ask people about KŠ12, and their first responses are about quality and safety. Ask them about higher education, and their first concerns are about whether their children will have an opportunity for it and whether they will be able to afford it. Higher education is still seen as valuable--no one is so unhappy with higher education that they have decided not to enroll their children. The policy elites in this country--the people on blue ribbon task forces and at Wingspread meetings--want to talk about quality, and the public wants to talk about access and affordability. Any serious conversation about the future must find a way to talk about both. Talking about either one by itself could damage higher education considerably.

The public is also well aware that most of the jobs that allow people to get into the middle class without at least some education or training after high school have disappeared. Recent data from the Department of Commerce confirms that this disappearance has been a fact in the American economy over the last fifteen years. There was a reason for calling the Center report on the polls, "The Closing Gateway." Higher education monopolizes access to economic opportunity in this country to a much greater extent than in the past. This does not mean that everybody can or should to go college. People with degrees understand that all the degree does is put you in the queue. It allows you to compete in the workforce. But people without some education or training beyond high school are pretty much out of luck. As Clark Kerr pointed out a year or so ago, the earnings premium of bachelor degree graduates over high school graduates went up from 40 to 80 percent in the 1980s. Much of that was deterioration at the bottom, for college graduates only improved their position slightly.

The cluster of problems we face here in California derives from this set of mismatches: demand is going one way, resources are going another, and public expectations still remain very, very high.

I must say a word about quality, for when we consider quality, we need to search our souls--just as every profession does. Some of you may remember George Bernard Shaw's statement that "All professions are a conspiracy against the laity." Derek Bok related that to higher education in his book Universities and the Future of America. He said, "The fact remains that left entirely to their own devices, academic communities are no less prone than other professional organizations to slip unconsciously into complacent habits, inward looking standards of quality, self-serving standards of behavior. To counter these tendencies, there will always be a need to engage the outside world in a lively, continuing debate about the universities' social responsibilities." Many of its critics accuse higher education of being inwardly focused. As in all professions, higher education professionals have definitions of quality, some--but not all--of which relate directly to the services provided. But definitions embody conventional wisdom about how things should be done and reflect personal and professional convenience--how it is most comfortable to do things. Left to their own devices, higher education professionals are no less prone than doctors or lawyers to equate quality with serving a smaller number of people at a high cost per individual. Doctors should not unilaterally apply their values to decide how many people get health care in this country. Nor should higher education professionals unilaterally decide how many people should have the opportunity for a college education. I worry about this because "quality" has become a buzz word for exclusion in California. When a large number of students have been cut out, the rational e -- more often than not -- has been quality. But nobody, not the Legislature, not the governing boards, no one has asked those who are making these decisions to demonstrate that quality would suffer. Higher education must develop a definition or concept of quality that is defensible as public policy, one that goes beyond the simplistic cost model.

Higher education has, I believe, given a message to the public that has hurt it politically in California at a time when the recession not only has battered people at the bottom but also has struck at the heart of the professional managerial class--the people who have always sent their children to college. The message was: "Support us in the manner to which we have become accustomed or we won't educate your children. Nor will we educate you if you need to come back to college." Again, I believe that higher education needs to examine its cost structure, to tear down conventional wisdom that productivity and quality is a zero sum game--one of our most cherished and most self-serving beliefs.

The last issue I want to raise about the context of accountability concerns community in higher education. I am aware of two efforts in the past year. One has to do with accreditation of four-year colleges and universities--the WASC committee report on self-regulation in higher education. The other was an appeal by Clark Kerr at the joint meeting of UC Regents and CSU Trustees. In both instances, the ducation. I am aware of two efforts in the past year. One has to do with accreditation of four-year colleges and universities--the WASC committee report on self-regulation in higher education. The other was an appeal by Clark Kerr at the joint meeting of UC Regents and CSU Trustees. In both instances, the central issue was whether there was some set of values--some piece of the accountability pie, if you will--that we as professionals have a special responsibility for addressing. Are there values which we are willing to ask society to entrust to us? Can we act collaboratively across institutions, from research universities to two-year colleges, and identify our responsibilities to address the long-term problems of both opportunity and quality in California? The question is whether there is a community out there that can work together with civility and with give and take, or is there just a fragmented collection of institutions. How do we address the common good--the common good of society--and the parts of it that are the responsibility of higher education? We talk more and more about social contracts, but everyone's favorite part of the social contract is the part that confers obligations on others and benefits on themselves. The question now is what is higher education willing to put into the kitty.etal ones. In California, the silence and passivity of the Legislature and the Governor over the past three or four years has been unfortunate. And higher education has hardly distinguished itself. Despite the hard work and many valiant efforts that individual colleges and universities have made as a collection of institutions, the results are not impressive. The other part of this is that no one has yet asked higher education in California to probe the fundamental questions. So the future is not just a problem for the colleges and universities; it is a problem for the people of the state and their political leadership as well. What I call "the policy vacuum" is the absence of any articulation of higher education's broad public responsibilities. In this vacuum, each institution and each sector looks only to itself, an unhealthy situation for everyone.

There seem to be two quite opposing viewpoints about higher education in the 1990s. On one side, there are those who, with great historical accuracy, point out that higher education has been through all this before. It has had ups and downs. It has had recessions. It has seen governors and legislatures--even congresses--that liked colleges and those that did not. Higher education has had student unrest. But one characteristic has held true: every time higher education has gone down, it has come up looking about the same as it did before, maybe a little leaner or meaner but pretty much doing business as it had in the past. And this has, in fact, been true throughout the post-World War II era. The opposing point of view--and mine--is that economic, organizational, demographic, and technological revolutions are reshaping every major social institution. These changes will not leave you, me, our colleagues, and our successors driving to work to do the same things the same way as we are doing them now.

Where one falls along this spectrum depends on whether one sees current problems as yet another cyclical downturn. If so, then an appropriate strategy might be to circle the wagons, cut at the margins, batten down the hatches, and hold on for dear life. But if not, then now is the critical time for reevaluating, redesigning and reinventing.

In California, any reinventing of higher education will be in the context of what appears to be a near civic breakdown, an enormous amount of fear and anxiety, and mean, little efforts to fix blame. Individuals or institutions must figure out the steps that higher education can take to bring society back together, for higher education ought to be part of the rebuilding of civic life in California. I suggest this not because we are better than anyone else but because, uniquely respected, we as education professionals have this special responsibility of keeping opportunity and hope alive for the people of California. We cannot meet this responsibility if we behave in totally self-interested ways. We have much to contribute, and we now have the chance to lead. California is the state that, by and large, when it has had resources, it has treated higher education quite well. We now have the chance to give something back.

It has been discouraging for me to watch the deterioration of the policy environment in California over the last three years. But the most encouraging thing is to find out how much energy, commitment, idealism and focus there is when one gets out to where people are struggling hard to meet the needs of students and faculty. Higher education is not a bankrupt enterprise, contrary to the assumptions of those in places where commitment and idealism are only abstractions. Higher education has been hurt, and we are a bit stunned by the difficulties of the last few years. But we have intellectual capacity; we have creativity, energy and the commitment to California higher education. We have these because of the quality of the people attracted into public and private colleges and universities over the past three decades. But as yet the "whole" has been less than the "sum of the parts." Our internecine battles and our tendencies toward denial seem to have been stronger than our ability to coalesce around the critical issues and around leaders who will move us toward solutions of these problems.

Ultimately, the issue of accountability is much larger than the "pinched" view of public responsibility that pervades regulatory processes and debates about them. The stakes are very high. The public purposes of higher education need to be re-articulated, and the means for achieving them must be found in an environment where much more will be expected of us. No one is arguing that the world will be a better place or that California will be better if the level of education in the population is lowered, or if fewer people are educated. As difficult as the past few years have been and as much as I respect the struggles that many of you in your institutions have made, there are still enormous difficulties and challenges in the future. But there are also almost unparalleled opportunities for serving the state and its people.

Patrick Callan is the executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center. This text was prepared from the transcript of his address, delivered at the Conference of the California Association of Institutional Research (CAIR), on November 3-4, 1994, in San Diego, California.