In 1994, Public Agenda conducted a series of focus groups in California communities. These were followed by a statewide public opinion poll later that year, and the findings of both projects were summarized in The Closing Gateway (September 1993). This report reflected significant public consensus that California should provide opportunity to those qualified and motivated to seek higher education, along with growing public anxiety that opportunity is decreasing. Californians told us they wanted a higher education system built around opportunity, personal responsibility, individual motivation, and reciprocity-the belief that people should give something back for what they receive. Support for innovation and change in higher education was offset by considerable skepticism about the restriction of opportunity through price increases and enrollment reductions, the two prominent approaches that state and educational policy makers have adopted in recent years.
More recently, the Center asked Public Agenda to discuss higher education with a group of California leaders who were identified with the assistance of an advisory committee. Preserving the California Legacy reports on these conversations. The most important findings include:
At the time of release of this report, it is anything but certain that such an effort will be made or how it might function. An effective process, however, will eventually have to address the insularity of current policy discussions, and it will have to incorporate viewpoints that go beyond small groups of educational administrators and state politicians who are directly responsible for policy. An effective process must be open to participation of the concerned public and to ideas that go beyond those currently under consideration by policy makers. The broad public interest in higher education is more critical to higher education's future than the sometimes parochial views of professional educators. A new forum must reach the most fundamental goals and policies, questioning organizational and fiscal patterns that have well served the state and the colleges in the past but may be less useful in the future.
In its three projects and two reports on California higher education, Public Agenda has provided both invaluable resources for addressing higher education's future and models for engaging the general public and leaders in the conversation. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the opinions expressed in the focus groups, surveys and interviews, the reporting of these views provides a check against insular or short-sighted higher education policy. Moreover, these views offer an opportunity for those engaged in higher education policy to listen to the public and to leaders of other sectors.
The Center is grateful to the leaders who generously contributed their time, energy and ideas to this project and whose deep and abiding concern for the future of California higher education infused the project and this report. We are grateful to John Immerwahr, Jill Boese and Deborah Wadsworth for their creative and enthusiastic leadership of this project and for their many contributions to our understanding of public perceptions of higher education.
The Center welcomes the responses of readers to our reports.
Patrick M. Callan
Executive Director