By Patrick M. Callan
California and its colleges and universities are in the eye of a hurricane. Only now emerging from the first part of the storm--the recession of the early 1990s--they must now face even more formidable challenges. The next ten years will see almost a half-million more applicants knocking on college doors than are now enrolled. At the same time, state fiscal resources will be constrained, for ominous long-term trends rose to the surface in the 1990s' recession.
Current estimates are that $4 billion in capital costs alone will be required to accommodate just the additional students. But neither the state nor its higher education institutions have policies or plans to meet this challenge, and few in leadership positions are even willing to acknowledge the difficult times ahead. Yet the risk that the quality of this system will deteriorate or that access will narrow is real and present.
California higher education survived the initial storm of the recession, albeit at the cost of reducing educational opportunity and enrollments and drastically increasing the cost to those who were admitted. But we are now in the delusive calm before the next storm. Despite an improved state economy, better budget prospects and the approval of new bonds, this is not the time to assume that academic business as usual can be resumed.
California does not have a bad plan for the future of higher education; it has no plan at all. The fragmented steps that are being taken, including the construction of new campuses without regard to the future availability of capital and operating support, may actually compound the long-term quality and access problems. Underlying many of these developments, the operative assumption seems to be that the bricks and mortar solutions of the 1960s will fit the educational and financial circumstances of the 1990s and the 21st century. And as new campuses are planned and built, many of the facilities on existing campuses continue to deteriorate as the backlog of deferred maintenance expands.
With the single exception of the Community College Commission on Innovation, there have been few attempts to look systematically at the contributions electronic technology might make to serving California's future needs for higher education. Nor has there been a systematic examination of the capacity of current campuses and facilities to serve more students if these facilities were properly maintained, renovated and more fully utilized.
Classes in the early mornings, late afternoons, evenings and summers would be inconvenient for some, but would allow access for others. Is it too much to expect that the state address such issues before it makes commitments to build new campuses, campuses that may be exorbitantly expensive, and that will certainly compete with existing campuses for scarce state operating and capital dollars?
The political pressures to build campuses have always been great. In the late 1950s the ad hoc and politicized approach to campus planning helped precipitate the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. At that time, to assure orderly and cost-effective growth, the Legislature imposed a moratorium on new campuses during the nine months while the Master Plan was being prepared. Is it time for another such moratorium?
Cutting ribbons to open new campuses will always be more politically attractive than replacing the plumbing of fifty-year-old buildings. But two good budget years do not predict a return to halcyon years of plenty; they are the deceptive calm at the eye of the hurricane. Now is the time to step back, to pause and to plan comprehensively before making expensive commitments. Now is the time for legislators with aspirations for new campuses, and for the higher education leaders who seem so eager to placate them, to ask basic questions about the future of California higher education, how it will be delivered, and how it will be financed.