California’s college turf war shows the need for a new plan for higher education

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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When the Legislature passed Master plan for higher education in 1960 he envisioned a seamless three-tier system that would provide high-quality, low-cost training for the benefit of both career seekers and society at large.

Under the plan, community colleges would specialize in preparing students for transfer to the University of California and California State University, as well as offer vocational and adult education courses.

The state university system will offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, engineering and other professional fields. The UC will be a place of research and will award not only bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but also doctoral degrees.

It never worked out as planned due to various economic and political reasons. Instead of cooperating as the plan suggested, the three systems of higher education fell into competitive positions, vying for both capital to expand campuses and operational support from governors and the legislature.

Over the past few decades, the competition for money has also become battles on academic turf. Community colleges have requested permission to award four-year bachelor’s degrees in some career fields and the state university system, while opposing the academic ambitions of community collegessought to award doctoral degrees, which the UC system saw as an invasion.

These incursions were signals that the bifurcated roles contained in the master plan were no longer realistic and, along with some other trends, should prompt a reconfiguration guided by the interests and needs of students and those of the larger California society.

Instead, internal struggles over who could do what continued and expanded into clashes over various transfer academic requirements and other operational issues, as well as money.

Community colleges and state universities pursued their expansionist goals one career field at a time in specific pieces of legislation, interweaving academic and geographic restrictions imposed by the legislature to appease opponents. The result is a strange array of four-year degrees that some community colleges can offer and doctorates that public universities can award.

The situation is a microcosm of the chronic inability of California politicians to comprehensively address glaring public policy problems. Instead, they deal with issues at the edges while ignoring the underlying fundamental conflicts.

Another example illustrates the syndrome: the incessant strife of the state water. The same interests fight the same apportionment issues year after year as governors and legislators come and go. No one is willing to invest the political capital needed to solve it once and for all.

Back to college turf battles.

The ongoing dispute erupted again in February when the community college chancellor’s office approved three new bachelor’s programs at Mesa College, Moorpark College and Southwestern College over objections from the state university system, which argued they were duplicative.

Almost immediately, two bills were introduced that, if passed, would make it easier for community colleges to offer more bachelor’s degrees, making it harder for the state university system to oppose expansion into specific career fields by arguing that they duplicate within geographic boundaries.

Of course, four-year universities oppose the measures, Senate Bill 960 and Assembly Bill 2694and in a sense this is understandable, because universities are like that experiencing stagnation or even declining enrollment. But the bills are moving.

This situation, the competition for students, will become more acute as California’s population shrinks or declines. The shrinking number of K-12 students leads to a shrinking pool of college applicants and fierce competition as enrollment drives state financial support.

This is one of several reasons why California needs a realistic overhaul of its higher education master plan that realigns the systems’ missions and expands opportunities for students.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.