If you do not know or do not care where you are going, any road will get you there. Californians do know and care; they want quality and opportunity maintained.8 Nonetheless, old road maps no longer serve. A new map is needed, one that can be relied on by the Governor and the legislators, by college and university leaders, by students and their parents, and by all Californians.
The road map to higher education's future-not the destination-is out of date. The recommended new social compact, in exploring a new route, is designed to breathe new life into California's traditional values of access and quality. It is intended to ensure that the historic commitment to college opportunity continues to guide California well into the next century.
Fair Shares: Opening the Discussion
Shared responsibility is a long-term, comprehensive, state policy for maintaining higher education's critical role in the civic and economic life of California. It is a plan for assuring that the next generation of students will have access to high quality colleges and universities at a cost they can afford. Its goals do not differ from those of the 1960 Master Plan. Shared responsibility, however, will impose burdens on all who benefit from that system-and all Californians benefit.
The burden of responsibility for higher education's future has always been shared to some extent; indeed, the Master Plan assigned different functions to the university, the state university, the community colleges, and the independent colleges and universities. This remains a prime example of shared responsibility. Consensus is unlikely, however, on how much responsibility each party should bear in the future. But the discussion must begin somewhere, or it will never take place. The Center suggests a sharing of responsibility that is fair, one that, to the extent possible, relies on incentives, not mandates. It is one that holds all parties-the state, the colleges and universities, and the students-accountable. And it has reciprocal benefits for the burdens imposed.
The State's Share. The state should protect its present capital investment in existing facilities and campuses and stabilize the level of operational funding for higher education. The state-the general public acting through its state leaders-should maintain the continuing capacity to assure college opportunity, including additional student financial aid. Additional funding for colleges and universities should be contingent upon enrolling eligible students, and the state should hold institutions accountable, annually assuring that its priorities are implemented. As part of the compact, colleges and universities would be freed of much of unnecessarily burdensome regulatory and financial controls in return for greater accountability for increasing access and educational quality. All Californians would benefit from assurances of continued quality and educational opportunity.
The College and University Share. The range of options for institutions of higher education to meet their share of responsibility is extensive. Although the Center recommends specific actions in the following section, not all are applicable to all institutions. Moreover, the colleges and universities should manage their own implementation of shared responsibility. Whatever their actions, the institutional response should be expected to reflect the needs and circumstances of the state over the next decade, the imperatives of cost-effectiveness and greater productivity, and the adoption of innovative practices to protect access and quality.9 They must find space for every qualified applicant, and be accountable to the state for doing so. With assurance of a stable budget, redistribution of resources to programs of the highest quality should be less threatening. California's colleges and universities should maintain competitive faculty salaries. Over time, the institutions will benefit from budgetary stability, greater flexibility and lower operating costs.
The Student Share. Expectations of students should increase, as should the opportunity and support for them to meet higher expectations. Student charges will increase with personal income, and with an additional, but annually limited, charge to contribute to the cost of increased enrollments. Students must expect to work harder to qualify for college, and then to move through the undergraduate curriculum more purposefully than in the past. Many students will face less convenient course scheduling. Students, however, would be the most direct beneficiaries of shared responsibility-of continued access to high quality, affordable higher education.
In the past, responsibility for higher education was shared, but the sharing was largely implicit. Under the formal, statutory structure of the 1960 Master Plan, the public colleges and universities were only loosely coordinated, and, until the 1990s, enrollment growth was regularly funded by the state under negotiated and relatively stable formulas.10 With few exceptions, state and higher education leaders have focused primarily on revenues.11 What would change under the new social compact would be the explicit consideration of the responsibilities the parties bear. The state, the colleges and universities, and the students and their families must each do more than they have in the past. The time has come to shift from emphasis on more revenues to what these revenues buy-to how money is spent-and to ask how opportunity and quality can be preserved with fewer resources behind each student.
Doing more in the future will be difficult for everyone. Students will probably respond to change, for they are not encumbered with higher education's business-as-usual habits and expectations. But institutional administrators and faculty do carry this burden, and implementing the policies proposed here will require something in the nature of a cultural change to separate what is central to educational quality from what is mainly convenient. Redistribution of programs and people will be difficult. California's elected leaders also face a challenge, for they alone can offer the policy direction and set the terms of shared responsibility for at least the next decade. The Governor and the Legislature must take the initiative. Without effective state leadership and policy guidance, California's public colleges and universities have little chance of keeping their envied place among the finest institutions in the nation, nor does California have much chance of retaining its place as America's premiere state.
Shared responsibility is a feasible, comprehensive plan, and the strategies suggested in the next section are policies and actions that, in the aggregate, would implement it. Without an explicit policy framework, one supported and ordered by realistic measures for implementation, California and its colleges and universities will wander in a wilderness of fragmented, ad hoc, short-term reactions. With such a framework, however, California can keep its promise of educational opportunity and high quality for the next generation.