The challenge for California is how to do more with less.
That's the fundamental issue that underlies a Public Policy Institute of California report released today, which projects that in 15 years California will have 1 million fewer college-educated workers than our state's economy will need.
To remedy the situation, the report, "Higher Education in California: New Goals for the Master Plan," by PPIC senior fellow Hans Johnson, calls for the UC and CSU to take a significantly higher proportion of California's high school graduates than they are currently admitting.
That will mean a major revision of California's famed but now outdated Master Plan for Higher Education. The plan now requires the UC system to take the top 12.5 percent of the state's high school graduates and the CSU system to take the top 33 percent. But the PPIC report says those percentages should gradually be boosted to 15 percent and 40 percent of high school graduates respectively.
And community colleges will have to take more students and make sure more of them transfer to four year colleges, especially CSUs. (One disturbing statistic: The number of transfer students from community colleges to CSUs has remained stagnant for the past two decades compared to UC transfers, which have risen by nearly 50 percent.) The report recommends that by 2025, 60 percent of CSU graduates and 40 percent of UC graduates should be students who earlier transferred from community colleges.
Johnson lays out a compelling argument for why the master plan is in need of revision. When it was written in 1960, only 11 percent of California's workforce had a college degree. Today, 31 percent do. And by 2025, 45 percent of the workforce will need one.
The only fly in the ointment is who will pay for this major expansion of college access. Johnson projects that it will cost the state an extra $1.6 billion to reach the 45 percent goal.
"It is certain that additional public funds will be necessary to realize the substantial increases in enrollment and graduates that are necessary to meet future economic demands," Johnson writes.
He tries to put a positive gloss on this by pointing out that all the funds wouldn't be needed right away, because the number of college graduates would have to be ratcheted up gradually. All the state would have to do is put in an extra $100 million now and increase its contribution over time.
But as every college student in California must know (and presumably their parents as well), the state has been contributing less money rather than more to its public universities. And contrary to admitting more students, they are admitting fewer of them.
Doing nothing is not an option, the PPIC report insists. "The status quo option is not conducive to closing the workforce skills gap," the report concludes. Nor is semi-privatizing state universities by jacking up fees or admitting more higher-paying, out-of-state students -- which some campuses are already doing in a limited way. More out-of-state students would mean fewer slots for Californians and would run "contrary to the state’s need to close the workforce skills gap."
The only option: more money from the state. And on today's cash-starved landscape, it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine where those funds would come from.
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