This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
It was the greatest education system the world had ever seen. They
built it into the eucalyptus-dotted Berkeley hills and under the bright
lights of Los Angeles, down in the valley in Fresno and in the shadows
of the San Bernardino Mountains. Hundreds of college campuses, large
and small, two-year and four-year, stretching from California's emerald
forests in the north to the heat-scorched Inland Empire in the south.
Each had its own DNA, but common to all was this: they promised a
"public" education, accessible and affordable, to those with means and
those without, a door with a welcome mat into the ivory tower, an
invitation to a better life.
Then California bled that system dry. Over three decades, voters
starved their state—and so their colleges and universities—of cash.
Politicians siphoned away what money remained and spent it more on
imprisoning people, not educating them. College administrators grappled
with shriveling state support by jacking up tuitions, tacking on new
fees, and so asking more each year from increasingly pinched students
and families. Today, many of those students stagger under
a heap of debt as they linger on waiting lists to get into the over-subscribed classes they need to graduate.
California's
public higher education system is, in other words, dying a slow death.
The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the
working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom
the University of California's creators held in mind when they began
their grand experiment
144 years ago. And don't think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state's woes are the nation's.
Dream Deferred
Rachel Baltazar
lives this grim reality. In 2010, after a decade working as a preschool
teacher and a teacher's assistant, the 28-year-old Baltazar went back
to school, choosing
De Anza, a
two-year community college near San Jose. She remembers the sticker
shock when she first arrived on campus—the cost per class had spiked
startlingly since she graduated from high school in 2000. She would live
lean, pick up side jobs, sacrifice what she could to get a degree. "I
was willing to be poor and not know if I'm gonna make it," she told me
on a recent morning, her roommate's cat meowing in the background. "I
wanted that degree so I could have a better future."
She squeezed 20 units of classes into a quarter (not the 12 to 15 of
the average student). She worried each week about having enough money
for rent, books, food. Still, she thrived. She founded De Anza's Women
Empowered Club, won the school's President's Award for overcoming
adversity, and planned to transfer to nearby Santa Clara University to
double major in psychology and women's studies—until, that is, a
state-funded "Cal Grant" fell through.
She met all the qualifications, she told me, but Cal Grant officials
informed her that she was too old. The likely culprit, whatever they
claimed: the endless state budget cuts that had
forced officials to
scale back the
Cal Grant program.
The experience, she said, shook her fundamental belief in the promise
California made to its students: "The impression you have is, 'I do a
great job at De Anza and I'll get to the next level.' The reality is
there might not be a place for you."
This is something new in what was once known as "the golden state."
For nearly as long as colleges and universities operated in California,
there was a place for every student with the grades to get in. Classes
were cheap, professors accessible, and enrollments grew at a rapid clip.
When my own father
started at
Mt. San Antonio College
in southern California in August 1976, anyone 18 or older could enroll,
and a semester's worth of classes cost at most $24. Then, like so many
Californians, he transferred to a four-year college, the University of
California-Davis, and paid a similarly paltry $220 a quarter. Davis's
2012 per-quarter tuition price: $4,620.
Today, public education in California is ever less public. It is
cheaper
for a middle-class student to attend Harvard (about $17,000 for
tuition, room, and board with the typical financial-help program
included) than Cal State East Bay, a mid-tier school that'll run that
same middle-class student $24,000 a year. That speaks to Harvard's
largesse when it comes to financial aid, but also the relentless rise of
tuition costs in California. For the first time in generations,
California's community colleges and state universities are turning away
qualified new students and shrinking their enrollments as state funding
continues its long, slow decline. Many students who do gain admission
struggle to enroll in the classes they need—which, by the way, cost more
than they ever have. "We're in a new era," says
John Aubrey Douglass, an expert on the history of higher education in California. He's not exaggerating. Not a bit.
"In the Valley with the People"
California would not exist as we know it today without higher
education. At its peak, the state's constellation of community colleges
and Cal State and University of California campuses had no rival. It was
the crown jewel of American education.
Abraham Lincoln launched the college-building craze when, in 1862, as
the bullets flew and the bodies fell on the battlefields of the Civil
War, he
signed the Morrill Act,
giving every state a huge tract of federal land with which to build a
public university. In 1869, California joined the craze by opening the
University of California. One newspaper editorial hailed it as "the
perfect structure, a magazine of new thoughts and new motives, ready for
the new and bright day of the future." Another supporter declared that
it would be a "mighty anchor in the stream of time."
Yet not until California's trust-busting Progressive politicians
claimed power in the early 1900s did the populist promise of the state's
higher education system begin to take shape. The Progressives saw
higher education as a path to the middle class—and with an educated
middle class they were convinced they could loosen the stranglehold
corporate powers like the Southern Pacific Railroad had on the state.
"The university was their Progressive dream come true," historian Kevin
Starr has written.
State
support for the University of California soared from a few hundred
thousand dollars in 1900 to more than $3 million by 1920. As future UC
president Clark Kerr
would write, "The campus is no longer on the hill with the aristocracy but in the valley with the people."
Down in that valley, more and more people wanted an education. New
campuses sprouted statewide before World War II, and then in its wake
were flooded with returning GIs and former war workers. Governor Earl
Warren used those colleges and universities as "shock absorbers" when
the state's wartime economy-on-steroids slowed. He put his money on a
novel concept: California would educate its way out of any post-war
slump.
The education system exploded in the 1940s and 1950s. Students poured
into classrooms. But not until Kerr became president did he and other
education leaders attempt to create a systemic blueprint for growth with
what was called the
"California Master Plan for Higher Education."
Under this plan, the brightest students were to attend a flagship UC
school, the next-smartest group would go to a Cal State school, and the
remainder would start at a two-year community college with an eye toward
transferring to a four-year college.
The Master Plan brought order to a rapidly growing system. It was
hailed around the world as a stroke of genius when it came to educating
young people. In 1960,
Time magazine even put Kerr
on its cover,
bestowing on him the title of "master planner." (Kerr was a complicated
figure. He later clashed with UC-Berkeley's famed Free Speech
Movement, yet FBI director J. Edgar Hoover believed
he was too close to campus activists and secretly pushed for his ouster. The college's board of regents
unceremoniously fired him in 1967.)
This was the heyday of California higher education. Enrollment grew
by 300% between 1930 and 1960, and the state's share of college funding
kept pace. But that all started to change on June 6, 1978, when
California voters approved
Proposition 13,
a ballot measure that limited property tax assessments. More
importantly, it handcuffed state lawmakers by requiring a two-thirds
supermajority any time they wanted to increase taxes, and made a
two-thirds vote among citizens necessary to raise local taxes. Prop. 13
kicked off
California's "tax revolt"
of the 1970s and 1980s, a slew of ballot measures that choked off
revenue for state and local governments and left lawmakers scrambling to
fill the gap. It was the beginning of the demise of public higher
education in California.
"We're Just Getting Chainsawed"
Journalist Peter Schrag describes what followed as the "
Mississippification"
of California. Hot with the fever of an anti-tax, small-government
movement, Californians began the long, slow burn-down of the state's
higher education system. As Jeff Bleich, a former
Cal State trustee
and former counsel to President Obama, put it in 2009, California
higher education "is being starved to death by a public that thinks any
government service—even public education—is not worth paying for. And by
political leaders who do not lead but instead give in to our worst,
shortsighted instincts."
The numbers tell the story. In 2011, public colleges and universities
received 13% less in state money than they had in 1980 (when adjusted
for inflation). In 1980, 15% of the state budget had gone to higher
education; by 2011, that number had dropped to 9%. Between the 2010-11
and 2011-12 state budgets, lawmakers sliced away another $1.5 billion in
funding, the largest such reduction in any high-population state in the
country.
Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the office of University of
California president Mark Yudof, couldn't contain her dismay when
reacting to recent cuts. "Here we have the world's best public
university system, and we're just getting chainsawed," she
told the
Daily Californian. "Public education is dying, and perhaps we are reaching a tipping point."
According to a 2010 report
by the Public Policy Institute of California, young adults in
California are less likely to graduate from college than their parents.
Among the 20 most populous states, California ranked 18th in 2010 in its
rate of students going straight from high school to college; factor in
all states and California ranked 40th. According to the institute, this
crumbling bridge between high school and college means California could
face a shortfall of a million skilled workers by 2025.
And what awaits the students who do make it into the ivory tower? Let
me paint you a grim picture. Colleges are filling the gap in state
funding by leaning ever harder on students and their families to pay
more in tuition and fees. Thirty years ago, the state accounted for
nearly 70% of public higher education funding; today, it's 25%. In the
last five years alone, student fees have
doubled for University of California and Cal State students. For community college students, they've leapt by 80%.
Students increasingly hunt for grants and scholarships to cover some
part of their growing share of the tab, but far more often their only
option is to take out loans. According to the Project on Student Debt,
in 2010 nearly half of all graduates of public and private four-year
schools in California
were saddled with an average
debt load
of $18,000. Nationally, a record one-in-five college graduates has
student loan debt, and in 2010, the national average for debt owed was
$26,682, according to a recent report from the
Pew Research Center.
In California, community colleges have always been the most
democratic of California's higher education options. They educate the
majority of students, offer the most classes, and provide students with
job training or a launching pad to a four-year college. They have,
however, taken a Mike Tyson-esque beating in California's budget crises,
losing $809 million—or 12% of their state funding—since 2008.
That's meant reduced class offerings, fewer sections of the classes
that remain, and the laying off of faculty and staff. At the start of
the 2012-13 school year, 85% of California's 112 community colleges had
waiting lists of students trying to get into overbooked classes. In all,
470,000 community college students were stuck in such a situation.
Eighty-two percent of these colleges said they weren't offering any
winter semester classes at all. Enrollment is down at community colleges
by 17%. "We're at the breaking point," Jack Scott, the recently retired
community college chancellor,
told the
Los Angeles Times in September.
Marianet Tirado, a student at Los Angeles Trade Tech, told the
Times that
class shortages meant it could take her three to four years to get her
two-year associate's degree. Tirado's situation is increasingly
commonplace. "It's hard to explain to my mom that I'm trying to go to
school but the classes are not there," she said.
The budget cuts have also hit faculty and staff hard. Seventy percent of community colleges
said in a recent survey
that they'd cut hours for support staffs. On Cal State campuses, the
faculty-student ratio has jumped from 21 students per faculty member in
1980 to 32-to-1 in 2010—and the same trend can be seen among the
system's elite schools, with the faculty-student ratio there inching up
from 16-to-1 to 21-to-1 over the same period. As faculty members deal
with larger class size, more papers to read, more tests to grade, their
pay has failed to keep pace. Salaries for Cal State professors haven't
budged from the $75,000 to $93,000 range for the last 30 years. Adjust
for inflation and CSU professors earned less in 2010 than they did in
1980.
So where did all that money go? Here's a hint: Look for the men who wear
orange jumpsuits,
sleep stacked atop each other in triple-decker bunk beds, and each year
gobble up an ever greater share of California's ever scarcer finances.
The State's higher education and prison systems are a study in
opposites. The prison system saw its state funding in dollars leap 436%
between 1980 and 2011. Back then, spending on prisons was a mere 3% of
California's budget; it's now 10%. According to
the nonpartisan transparency group California Common Sense, the prison population expanded at eight times the growth rate of California's population. In May 2011, the US Supreme Court
ordered
the state to immediately shrink its prison population because its
treatment of prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment. At the
time, its 33 prisons
held 143,321 inmates (official capacity: 80,000).
If money talks, then California's message is plain enough: prisoners
matter more than students. Put another way: college is the past, jail is
the future.
Anger and disillusionment over California's abandonment of its
students, teachers, and staff boiled over in 2011. Protests sprung up at
campuses across the state. Students
shut down a meeting of the University of California's Board of Regents,
walked out of classes at San Francisco State, and clashed with truncheon-swinging police in
Long Beach and
Berkeley.
But the most indelible of these protests unfolded on the campus of
UC-Davis, an hour's drive northeast of San Francisco. Student protesters
there disobeyed campus rules by staging a peaceful sit-in on a footpath
in the campus quad. For their efforts Lt. John Pike, a barrel-chested,
helmeted, mustachioed campus cop,
doused them
with pepper spray. He did so in a manner so nonchalant that it
triggered immediate shock and outrage; photos and videos of the incident
shot across the globe in meme form. There was Lt. Pike
pepper-spraying God in Michaelangelo's "Creation of Adam,"
soaking the Declaration of Independence in John Trumbull's 1817 painting,
feeding the raging flames that swallowed up the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc after he had set himself ablaze in Saigon in 1963.
A rallying cry for the dozen or so students who occupied that path
was the price of an education. In just eight years, tuition at UC-Davis
had more than doubled.
Back to School—or Not?
Rachel Baltazar did not show up for fall classes at Santa Clara
University. Without the state grant she'd hoped for, she returned to De
Anza for a third year. She's starting a paid internship in which she'll
school students in how to better navigate the world of college financial
aid. "I want to try to help people understand what their options are,"
she told me. "I don't want somebody else to be in my shoes. It was so
hard."
Recently, Baltazar and a friend traveled down the coast to Santa
Cruz. She stopped in a tourist shop, and a postcard on a rack caught her
eye. It listed a smattering of facts from 1981, the year she was born.
Her gaze settled on one particular figure: Harvard University tuition
was then $6,000. The nation's oldest and most prestigious university had
cost just six grand. That's $15,206 in today's dollars. She couldn't
believe it. At De Anza, Baltazar said she spent $18,000 a year in
tuition and living costs.
Baltazar told me that she's still set on getting her bachelor's
degree. She'll try again for Santa Clara, and also apply to state
schools. She's not picky; she can't afford to be. "I will apply to
anybody who will take me and help me pay for it," she said.
Like a lot of young people in California, Baltazar clings to the
dream of public higher education, but in her life, as in those of so
many others across the state, it's curdling into something more like a
nightmare. "I went to school in California because I knew there were
more financial aid options, I knew about the Cal Grant, and I thought,
'I should be able to get these things,'" she told me. "In California,
the education system is great—if you can afford it. If you can't afford
it, it's kind of a moot point."
California once led the way into a system of unparalleled public
higher education. It now seems determined to lead the way out of it.
Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in D.C. bureau of Mother Jones
magazine.
He's the son of two graduates of California's higher education system,
and he himself graduated from a public institution, the University of
Michigan. An associate editor
at TomDispatch, he writes about politics, money, and the economy, and
can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com.To stay on top of
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