By Carl Irving and
William Trombley
Although Governor Pete Wilson's 1996Ð97 spending plan for colleges and universities is the most generous of his five years in office, it does little to solve the long-term problems of California higher education.
Blessed with higher state revenues than expected and facing a political threat from Democrats who were using the sharp tuition increases of recent years as an effective political weapon, the governor has decided to spend more money on higher education. Wilson recommended increases in state spending of six percent for the University of California, 4.2 percent for the California State University and 3.3 percent for community colleges. This will finance the second year of the governor's "compact" with higher education, providing for enrollment increases of about one percent in all three systems, as well as pay raises for UC and Cal State faculty and staff members.
The proposal includes enough money ($30 million for Cal State, $27 million for UC) to make planned fee increases unnecessary. Nor has the governor asked for higher community college charges--a sharp departure from recent years, when he has requested hefty fee increases at the two-year colleges.
Responding to pleas from the state's private colleges and universities, Wilson has added $10 million to the state scholarship, or "Calgrant," program. This would increase from $5,250 to $7,100 the award for each new Calgrant recipient who elects to attend a private school. This would be the first increase in the maximum Calgrant award since 1989.
"This is the best news we've had in a long time," said Jonathan Brown, president of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. He expressed confidence that the larger awards, covering about 45 percent of average private college tuition costs, would enable more high school graduates to attend private, rather than public, campuses. The California Postsecondary Education Commission has estimated that there are between 20,000 and 40,000 empty spaces in the state's private institutions.
After several years of recession-driven budget cuts, the proposed 1996Ð97 increases were welcomed by California's higher education leaders. Richard C. Atkinson, UC's new president, said the budget "demonstrated (Wilson's) wholehearted commitment to higher education and the need to safeguard UC quality and access."
But some educators and politicians warned that the proposals largely ignore the need for basic higher education reform and do little to prepare the state for "Tidal Wave 2"--the expected influx of at least 450,000 additional students in the next ten years.
"Clearly, we've taken a strong turn in the right direction," Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz said, "but we have got to look past the current year at some basic problems, like pricing, affordability and financial aid. You can look on the bright side and say this gives us another year to philosophize about these issues or you can look at it a little more darkly and say this is just another year of delay."
State Senator Lucy Killea, a San Diego Independent who has taken a strong interest in state higher education policy, said, "this is nice but it's not a major policy decision." Santa Monica Democrat Tom Hayden, who chairs a Senate select committee on higher education, said the governor's proposals "do not deal with long-term solutions" but do provide a "welcome break" from the budget cuts and rising student fees of recent years. "Hopefully, this will become a breathing space for tackling the larger issues of access and affordability," he said.
Hayden and others noted that rapidly escalating student charges were creating a political problem for Wilson. Last year, Senate Democrats thwarted the governor's efforts to increase UC and Cal State fees by ten percent, and Senate Democratic leader Bill Lockyer was threatening to renew the fight this year. Meanwhile, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis was gaining support for a ballot initiative that would have frozen fees for three years. With state revenues running substantially ahead of projections, Wilson decided to use some of the expected $1 billion surplus to eliminate the need for fee increases. As a result, average undergraduate fees will remain $4,139 at UC and $1,891 at Cal State. Community colleges will continue to charge $13 per unit.
UC's non-resident tuition will increase from $7,699 to $8,394 next year and charges for certain professional schools--medicine, dentistry, law, veterinary medicine and business administration-- also will rise by $1,000 or more.
Even if the Legislature goes along with the governor and maintains student charges at their present level for another year, the issue is likely to remain alive. There is no certainty that Wilson, a recent convert to the idea of holding down fees, will continue to hold that position. And there is still a wide ideological gap between most Republicans and most Democrats in the Legislature on the question of how much public subsidy should go to the colleges and universities.
"We're in a pretty precarious position right now," said Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political scientist who specializes in state government and politics. "There's not likely to be a tax increase with Governor Wilson, and at least one house is in Republican hands. Even if everyone had absolutely positive intentions, we're in trouble, because not everybody feels very positive about subsidizing higher ed."
While Wilson has proposed the best operating budgets higher education has seen in this decade, little money is provided for capital outlay--new buildings and equipment and maintenance of existing facilities. Only $10 million has been earmarked for deferred maintenance in the nine-campus UC system, only $9.6 million for the 22 Cal State campuses, although each system claims to need hundreds of millions of dollars to bring facilities up to par.
"Everybody says deferred maintenance is a big problem but nobody wants to pay for it," said UC budget director Lawrence C. Hershman. "The core infrastructure of the place is in real trouble."
For new construction, the governor's budget depends almost entirely on a bond issue that is unlikely to pass.
In early January, after months of wrangling, the governor and legislative leaders agreed to place a $3 billion combined public schools-higher education bond issue on the March 26 primary ballot.
It will be Proposition 203, last of 12 measures to be listed. If approved, the bond issue would provide $975 million for higher education construction, to be divided equally among UC, Cal State and the community colleges. The rest of the money would go to elementary and secondary schools.
For months, Republicans refused to vote for school bonds unless they were combined with new prison construction, while Democrats, especially in the Senate, were opposed to this linkage. The logjam was broken when Assemblyman Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga persuaded his Republican colleagues in the Assembly to vote for the school bond measure because it would certainly fail, allowing a $1.7 billion prisons-only bond issue to be placed on next November's ballot.
Few Sacramento observers give the March bond issue much of a chance. Voters have repeatedly rejected education bonds in recent years. In June, 1994, a higher education bond issue lost by a margin of 52.6 percent to 47.7 percent. Backers will have to raise about $1 million in a short period of time, to have any chance for victory. In addition, the March primary will focus on the Republican presidential nomination and in the recent past California's Republican voters have shown little interest in education bonds.
However, supporters claim their polling shows that combining public schools with colleges and universities increases chances of passage by four or five percent. They also believe there will be growing pressure on Republicans in the Assembly to support the bonds, since many of them represent rapidly growing suburban school districts that sorely need money for new school construction.
With the school bond controversy finally settled and the student fee issue moot for at least another year, a cloak of indifference is likely to settle over California public higher education discussions in Sacramento.
This has not been a high priority for Governor Wilson, although he has now assigned Joe Rodota, his deputy chief of staff, to examine ways of increasing faculty productivity and of shortening the time students take to earn their degrees. Rodota sat in on final budget talks with UC, Cal State and the community colleges last fall but has told administrators that he will study the state higher education scene for several months before making any recommendations.
Because of term limits, many of higher education's friends in the Legislature are either retiring or running for other offices. The list includes State Senators Alfred E. Alquist and Nick Petris and Assemblymen Bob Campbell and John Vasconcellos, all Democrats. Willie Brown, a sometime ally of higher education, is now the mayor of San Francisco. Tom Campbell, a Stanford University law professor and a moderating influence among Republicans in the Legislature, has been elected to Congress.
Hayden is probably the best-informed state senator on college and university matters. So far, however, his select committee has held several newsworthy hearings but has had little impact on state policy. Among Senate Republicans, only David Kelley, of San Diego County, has shown much interest in the topic.
Republican Brooks Firestone, an heir to the tire fortune and owner of a Santa Ynez Valley winery, is likely to be the next chairman of the Assembly higher education committee, replacing Democrat Marguerite Archie-Hudson.
With Archie-Hudson as chair, the committee spent a lot of time on questions of access and affordability, but Firestone has a much more conservative agenda. For instance, he believes the state no longer can afford to provide postsecondary education for every reasonably qualified high school graduate. Firestone favors "threshold exams" to enter community college, as well as other limitations on admission to the state's public colleges and universities.
A discussion about limiting access to public higher education would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and demonstrates how far the state has strayed from the principles of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education The Master Plan is now in "shambles," said analyst William Pickens, former director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission. "For lack of an agenda, we lurch from year to year."
In the early 1990s, all the lurching was in a downward direction, as the illustrations accompanying this article show. Between the 1990Ð91 and 1994Ð95 academic years, state General Fund support declined by 17.5 percent, student fees increased 93 percent and enrollment dropped ten percent.
Higher fees and a deliberate downsizing policy lowered Cal State enrollment by about 50,000 students. When the Legislature decided to charge community college students who already held bachelor's degrees $50 per unit, instead of $13, thousands dropped out of the two-year schools. A 1993 national survey found that California was the only major industrial state to suffer a decline in the percentage of high school graduates going on to college.
Conditions improved somewhat last year. The governor agreed to annual funding increases averaging four percent over a four-year period for both UC and Cal State. Fees in both senior systems were frozen at their current levels and the $50 community college "differential" fee was dropped.
After several years of decline, Cal State enrollment jumped by about 6,000 in fall, 1995, although some of the larger campuses-- San Jose State, Cal State Los Angeles and Cal State Long Beach among them--continued to fall short of their enrollment targets. However, community college enrollment dropped about one percent, the fourth straight year of decline. If the Wilson budget proposals are accepted by the Legislature, 1996Ð97 should bring additional recovery from the devastating cuts of the early '90s. But the fundamental problem will remain--the state has neither a plan nor the financial resources to cope with the enrollment increases the next decade is expected to bring.
Nor are there any major efforts to solve the problem. In contrast to states like Illinois or Virginia, which have carried out large-scale reforms of their higher education systems in recent years, California seems content to apply an occasional Band-Aid.
Both Cal State Chancellor Munitz and UC President Atkinson have urged their campuses to eliminate unnecessary course offerings, consolidate expensive research programs and trim administrative costs, but the response has not been overwhelming.
The California Education Roundtable has contracted with RAND, the Santa Monica think tank, for a study of some aspects of the Master Plan, but no one is required to pay attention to these recommendations. For major change to take place, leadership from the governor or the Legislature, preferably both, is needed, but so far such leadership has been lacking.
"I think a major restructuring is almost impossible in the absence of leadership from one or more 'umbrella' state voices," Munitz said in an interview with Crosstalk. "Even a collection of institutions can't do it, in the absence of a leadership voice, either legislative or executive or both. Without that, it won't happen."