Introduction


In the fifties and sixties California had the greatest educational system that had ever existed anywhere on the face of the earth. You had high quality public elementary and secondary schools, high quality universities, and costs were nominal; all the student had to do was to stay alive. In broader social terms it was highly desirable in that it provided for upward mobility for those who chose to make the effort. Today, I will pay more tuition for my child to go to third grade in private school than I paid for college and law school combined. I personally don't care because I am rich and I can afford it. But I got a chance to be rich because education was available at virtually no cost. My parents didn't have the money and I didn't play baseball. But what about the family that is situated today the way mine was in the fifties? You create a lack of promise that has widespread implications; it creates a have and have-not society which is the last thing we want.
--California business executive


California's higher education system has historically been the jewel in the state's generally glittering crown. Today that legacy can no longer be taken for granted: higher education is beset with the simultaneous threats of higher costs, decreasing state support, and what Clark Kerr calls "Tidal Wave II," a new influx of college-age students (many of them minority members) who will flood the system in much the same way that the baby boom did.

In 1993 the Public Agenda, at the request of The California Higher Education Policy Center, conducted an extensive survey of public attitudes toward higher education in California and presented the survey results in a study called The Closing Gateway. That study documented Californians' fears that just as higher education was becoming more important than ever before, it was also becoming less accessible.

To further broaden the conversation about public higher education in California, the Public Agenda has now conducted a series of confidential in-depth interviews with twenty-nine leaders from around the state. For the most part, these leaders are neither higher education professionals nor policy makers directly involved in legislation regarding higher education (for more details about the respondents, see appendix). What they have in common is that they hold prominent leadership positions in a variety of fields. Their views, which we highlight in this report, thus provide another piece of the picture which we hope will be helpful to those who are dealing with higher education issues in California today. In this introduction we briefly summarize the key findings from the leadership interviews and compare and contrast leadership views to what we found among the general public. In the main body of the report we describe the leadership views in more detail, illustrating our comments with extensive quotations from the respondents themselves.
The following four main points of comparison with the attitudes of the general public help define what we found among our leadership interviewees.

1. Vast Differences in Knowledge of Higher Education

    The Public: In our interviews with members of the public around the state, we found a great deal of concern about higher education but relatively low levels of knowledge and understanding. Most people in California, especially those who do not have a college degree themselves, know relatively little about the internal workings of higher education.

    Leaders:     Our leadership respondents, by contrast, are extremely knowledgeable about higher education. They are intimately familiar with the terms of the Master Plan (indeed, some were involved in its inception), many have served on higher education boards of one sort or another, and most follow higher education issues closely in the news media and through their professional contacts.

2. A Similar Definition of the Problem

Despite the vast gulf between the knowledge base of the two groups, both share a remarkably similar definition of the problem.

The Public: For the public, the key issue is a clash between two seemingly inexorable trends. On the one hand, college education is perceived as increasingly important for entrance into the American middle class. At the same time, people in California believe that access to higher education has become increasingly difficult and will become even more difficult in the future.

Leaders: Our leaders make the same point: in our interviews, they constantly stressed the importance of the state's tradition of high-quality, low-cost education, and their fears that this important resource is increasingly threatened.

The primary concern for both groups, in other words, is that without major changes, the gateway that was so instrumental in creating California's well-educated middle class will be slammed in the face of a new generation of Californians, precisely at a time when education is more important than it ever has been.

3. Different Perspectives on the Solution

Although their analysis of the problem may be similar, our leaders have a rather different perspective on the nature of the solution. To put the difference in a nutshell, the public is primarily worried about the price of higher education (that is, the prices paid directly by students and their families), and they are looking for someone, government perhaps, to help them pay it. The leaders, by contrast, are primarily worried about the cost of higher education (both in terms of the cost to the state's taxpayers and in terms of why it costs so much to provide higher education). Leaders feel that higher education itself must be a major part of the solution.

Higher Education and Health Care: To a remarkable degree, higher education issues can be helpfully compared to health care. Public Agenda's research suggests that for the most part people are satisfied with the health care they are receiving, but they are concerned that they or their families may one day find that they can no longer afford it. What they are looking for is not radical change in the health care system, but changes that guarantee their access to the existing health care system. Leaders, by contrast, frequently stress the need to reform the health care system itself, since they feel that access cannot be guaranteed if the health care system remains as it is.

We found much the same dialectic going on between leaders and the public in California on higher education.

The Public: While the public definitely wants changes to ensure the continued affordability of higher education, they are not, at the moment, calling for systemic reforms in the way higher education is organized. What people respond to most enthusiastically are changes in the way that higher education is funded; they are especially attracted to ideas such as work-study programs that will provide students with ways to pay for their own education.

Leaders: The leaders we interviewed, however, believe that higher education itself must make major changes if it is to preserve its viability. They are not optimistic that government spending will be able to improve the situation or even maintain the status quo. As a result, they are convinced that higher education must be prepared to make major changes to hold down escalating costs. We repeatedly heard calls for a radical restructuring of higher education, analogous to some of the corporate restructuring that has gone on over the last twenty years. Our interviewees continually referred to specific redundancies and inefficiencies in higher education which they felt could be profitably eliminated. Their concern is not just to lower the price tag for higher education, but to ensure the financial viability of higher education. They do not think that this can be done without radical changes in higher education itself, and they think the state's higher education institutions have only begun to face the challenge.

4. Pessimism about the Process

The Public: As might be expected in a state that has been suffering from a sluggish economy for a number of years, we heard a great deal of pessimism in our discussions with members of the general public. The clearest exemplification of this was a widely shared frustration with state government, and a feeling that funds for projects such as higher education were being misdirected and misspent, coupled with a sense of widespread corruption in state government at all levels.

Leaders: We also heard a surprising degree of pessimism among the leaders. In contrast to the public, the leaders did not focus on the moral failings of educational bureaucracies but on a perceived bankruptcy in the process for debating and discussing critical issues such as higher education. There was a widely shared view that decision making has broken down, and that the debate has become insulated and ineffective. There is a sense that the issues are great but that no one is really facing up to them.


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