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SECTION TWO: Specific Recommendations

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1. CONSENSUS: Use existing facilities more efficiently.

There is a widely shared perception that the existing facilities could be used much more efficiently through implementing a 12-month academic year and using facilities more efficiently during the day. The only cautionary notes were that some of these ideas had been explored in the past and had been less successful than anticipated. Nonetheless, most people think there is room for considerable savings in this area.

(a) The damn law school sits there for three months without anyone using it; why don't we open it for more students? We are supposedly worried about competitive faculty salaries, so perhaps we could pay the faculty for the summer. We do have to take a fundamental look at facilities and costs.

(b) In Russia they are running the labs and libraries 24 hours a day. I think we may come to that.

(c) I walk across the UC Davis campus in the afternoon. You could shoot a gun in any direction and you might hit someone but you probably wouldn't because of the low use of campus after 4:00 PM and on weekends. More efficient use [of the campus] could give you gains in terms of facilities.

(d) We need to make much better use of current facilities. Some people will say we tried it and it didn't work, but we can make it work better.

(e) I am all in favor of year-round school. I don't see a whole lot of need for a three month break just because it is summer now.

(f) I am an absolute proponent of year-round education at all levels. We are wasting significant amounts of natural resources. It goes back to this: we have too many people coming into the pipeline. You can throw more money at the problem or you can start thinking about the pipeline itself. Maybe you can increase the speed on the conveyer belt or reduce the stops along the conveyor belt (namely, require fewer credits).

There was a good deal of support for introducing greater progressivity in the means by which students pay for higher education, but there were differences about how this should work out. Some favored what might be called a high-fee, high-scholarship model. Others wanted the state to explore long-term loans so that students paid back educational costs in proportion to their income. Others were concerned more progressive fees would impact negatively on either the middle class or the poor, depending on how they were implemented.

(a) The best principle would be to peg educational costs to a loan to be repaid in some way on the basis of income.

(b) This gets us into the social issue-those that have resources subsidizing those that don't. If you don't provide the opportunity for those who are less well off, you create social problems. I think that it is a mistake to have a tiered tuition structure. If we are going to help lower income families that should be done through scholarships. Generally I think the tuition should be the same for all but it is OK to have more scholarships for those who can't pay as much.

(c) A family that can choose between Stanford and Berkeley for their child should pay more like what they would pay at Stanford if they can afford it. Generally it makes sense to not subsidize people who can afford it.

(d) Progressive systems are difficult to administer. I'm really concerned about all of these students who come out of school with major debt that they have to face. With all of the restructuring that has been going on the private sector, the pay levels are not significant, then they are faced with debt. I think that if you were to raise the fees at these public institutions, even with scholarships it would be a disincentive for a great number of young people.

(e) It makes sense to introduce progressivity; I've argued that there should be means testing for scholarships. Many private universities use need-based scholarships. Some ways are more appetizing than others. I could support a higher fee structure and provide means-tested scholarships.

(f) I think we should explore more progressivity but I am concerned about the middle class. Higher fees plus scholarships tend to hurt middle-class people.

(g) I would be opposed to a system where they increased the fees and also increased the scholarships. What you would find is that the scholarships would be the first thing that gets cut; then you would just have the high fees.

Not surprisingly, most of our respondents thought that new technologies in higher education should be explored. The differences here were more a matter of degree of enthusiasm. Some of our panelists see great savings here, and believe that the universities are dragging their feet in this area as well as others. Others urge more caution, and stress downsides as well.

(a) If you look at industry, they are sending people home with equipment. In some industries they have found that they can't afford to support a large staff, so rather than demoralize everyone by layoffs they have found a way to do it by letting people work at home and use the office as a meeting place.

(b) There are tremendous savings possible: for example, in lecture classes, you could have the greatest lecturers in the world with a live instructor there. Then you could stop the video, go back and discuss it. You could have Albert Einstein giving the lecture on quantum physics, and you could also have classes where there would be an individual instructor.

(c) Youngsters are comfortable with new technology and the potential of doing some course preparation by computer is powerful. It doesn't substitute for classes. Perhaps students could do a good part of hearing the lecture by video by computer, and then have the class work be much more hands on, one session per week of tutorial with several hours of lecture resulted in a lot more learning. It would take an enormous amount of retraining of the faculty.

(d) Efficiency gains are obviously possible, particularly for courses where there is no human contact, especially where there are freshman survey courses where kids sit and there are no discussions just lectures. If there are 250 why not make it 2,000? But higher education should also offer classes for ten to twenty students where there is real dialogue.

(e) CSU has nineteen campuses, and suppose at each of them someone offers an intro lecture course in one subject. Do we need to do that nineteen times? It seems to me we ought to be able to produce a better way of delivering that instruction than to have someone standing in front of a class in nineteen places. Maybe you want more small groups, one to one, discussions, labs. There is an enormous amount of redundancy and overlap; technology might help to reduce it.

(f) New technology is clearly a way to use reduce expenditures; teachers in Davis can teach nine classes around the state, with TAs in different classes. I think there is benefit with new tech but you can lose the benefit of [in-class] educational experience.

(g) There are possibilities there: it is something to be explored, not something to be grabbed at. There is a great tendency to say, hey the information superhighway, let's get on. It still has to be tested, there may be marginal gains, I'd like to see.

(h) I don't know what it means. I can understand how computers can do things at home that you didn't have to go to school to do; there is computer assisted exchange of education. I can think of things that promise some kind of efficiency, but I remember when they said that TV would dramatically alter higher education but it hasn't made any significant impact. I am skeptical that technology is going to offer solutions to these problems. Obviously, technology has got all kinds of educational ramifications, but whether it will solve all of the problems I don't know.

(i) New technologies bring both promise and risk, and the phrase "appropriate technology" has as much relevance in education as it does to manufacturing.

Many of our respondents think that higher education can be more selective than it has been in supporting graduate and professional programs. Here again, the support is a function of degree. No one says that what the state needs most is more graduate programs, and most people think some consolidation is possible. The difference is in the amount of redundancy that is perceived. Some of the panelists feel that there is a great deal of room here, while others urge caution and selectivity.

(a) There should be much more selectivity in funding graduate programs. The longing to be a full-service university, with all of the offerings is really a big mistake. Every state college wants to get there, they all want to have everything under the sun.
(b) The idea is that every one of these nine UC campuses wants to be a full-blown university with every form of grad program doesn't make sense. They are inching toward some consolidation but not fast enough.

(c) Every university campus wants to be their own total university but the concept is the synergistic relation of each part to the whole. There should be one law school and you go to that law school. We have Bolt, Davis, and UCLA-and now San Diego wants one. They operate under a self-imposed criteria: to be a true university you need to have everything. It might be true if you are Notre Dame, but we are the University of California; it should be looked at as a system.

(d) There are opportunities here. We can't afford or and don't need nine complete universities. Why does Berkeley need an agriculture program? No one wants to bite the bullet; there are examples of redundancy throughout the system. We need to ask whether the state needs or can afford five law schools, and how one consolidates. I would expand consolidation well beyond graduate and professional programs.

(e) It is my observation that there are a great number of classes that are offered in CSU system and UC system and are perhaps desirable and nice, but are not all that necessary. There should be a close examination of the entire curriculum. Let's focus more on what is actually needed to educate people in the basic majors. Then if they want to take some of these additional courses, those courses could be offered outside of the basic degree. When resources are tight you need to find ways to key in on insuring that students can get a good solid basic education in the degree of their choice, but we can reduce some of the courses outside of the degree programs. Cost savings will come in by reducing the number of professors available to teach all of these courses. If students want to take those courses, they would have to pay for it themselves.

(f) Reducing the number of graduate programs is a sound approach, but you have to take into consideration, students are not able to handle the additional cost associated with additional travel and perhaps room and board.

(g) I would tend to doubt that California can do with fewer public law schools. They are among the best in the world, and I don't think that combining them offers any prospect of significant savings. UC Berkeley is an enormous institution. Compared to that the cost of the law school is tiny, but it is of enormous value to the state. I don't think there is much to be saved there.

(h) There is something to be said for creating niches of excellence, but you also need some aggregation of people and resources. That again takes a lot of thoughtful review. For example, if you remove a biochem division the people who are involved in psychobiology, computer sciences and biology can be affected as well.

(a) The doctrine has gotten established that teaching loads should be light because there must be time for research. The corollary is that every professor is a born researcher and therefore needs the time to do research. In my judgment a fraction of the faculty are qualified by their gifts or their preparation to do creative research, and the remainder are getting a free ride. They fill the journals with less creative stuff. My inclination would be to increase the teaching loads, and give exemptions for those who are of proven distinction, a research status that absolutely had to be proven and judged by peers, and awarded to a limited number of the faculty. Most teachers are not born or trained to really advance the research in their fields; they do marginal or trivial work. There should be a lot more credit for good teaching, a lot more honor for good teaching so that good teachers are not perceived as second-class citizens.

(b) At the time of the Master Plan the average professor at UC spent twice as much time in the classroom as today, and UC was in a golden age then. It has gone down from nine hours per week to four and one half.

(c) Everyone who looks at the educational system thinks that teachers ought to be able to teach more than four courses. I think teaching is unbelievably difficult, so I would be more interested in ways to put in improvement schemes for teaching, both in terms of incentives for good teaching and constant review and opportunities to work with professors on their teaching. Education has left teachers alone, and I don't think it makes a lot of sense. I think the incentives are skewed away from teaching toward research.

(d) The idea of heavier teaching loads has been kicked around for years, going back to the Reagan administration. Especially in the UC system there is tremendous resistance. For the most part it is beneficial to the state to have the strong research continuum, but it needs to be monitored closely. I don't know if you will see much of a change.

(e) I think there is more emphasis on research and writing, which is more likely to lead to promotion and advancement.

(f) I don't think that increasing the teaching load for faculty is necessarily a good idea. The reality is that many of those teachers, especially in the sciences, are spending time in the labs, working up grant proposals. Reducing the teaching load reduces grant money, and hurts the revenue side. It is a nice, simple, easy issue to focus on but it is more counterproductive than it looks.