A special roundtable examines the public and private financing problems of higher education

PHOTOS BY PAUL TITANGOS  

HEY ARE IMAGES of rent landscapes and changed futures--a punctured San Francisco Bay Bridge, California State University at Northridge amid collapsed buildings and fractured walkways--and, perhaps the most dramatic of these images, the Meishin Expressway in Kobe, Japan, with its sculptured pylons still intact, toppled as if by a wayward child.

Increasingly, these are also the metaphors being invoked to describe the forced, often abrupt changes now facing American higher education. What is becoming clear is that many--some would say most, a few would claim all--of the basic presumptions that underlie both the operation and financing of the enterprise are in flux. Hence this essay is about living in an earthquake zone--about learning to build the kind of flexible institutions, public policies, and approaches to funding that will allow higher education to flourish in the face of uncertainty. Metaphorically, it is about new building codes designed to preserve and enhance the academy's long-standing commitment to access and quality.

The essay itself derives from a special roundtable on the public and private financing of higher education, jointly convened by the California Higher Education Policy Center and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, with support from the Ford Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation. Our conversations were intense, more than a little frightening, and in the end, remarkably optimistic. We came to understand that higher education was only at risk if it became brittle, made rigid by its own fixed costs and practices.

Our discussions were informed by two sets of commissioned papers: One was a group of case studies that examined the political and financial circumstances of five states to understand the climate for public and private institutions of higher education in those settings. A second set of papers surveyed national trends and posed the broad policy questions that for nearly three decades now have been at the center of discussions concerning the financing of public and private higher education.

Perhaps it was only coincidence, but California provided historical as well as geological context for our discussions. Like many other discussions of the public financing of higher education, ours began by taking account of two California-based initiatives. The first was the California Master Plan for Higher Education, that remarkably coherent vision of higher education enacted in 1960 to provide for both access and quality. As originally conceived, there were to be three distinct layers of public institutions--community colleges, state colleges, and university campuses--each stratum with a unique mission, each serving a different academic segment of the college-going population. An integral part of the Master Plan was its generous scholarship program to assist residents choosing to enroll in a private institution within the state. To ensure full access, the cost to the student was kept purposefully low.

The second California legacy was the work of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education during the late 1960s and early '70s, under the leadership of Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California. It was the Carnegie Commission that provided the classic formulation of the question that came to shape public policy toward higher education: "Who pays? Who benefits? Who should pay?" The Commission's own answer, echoing the success of the California Master Plan, was that higher education benefits not just the individual but society as a whole; the return on the societal investment is not just an educated citizenry but a more vital and productive national work force.