Confirmations

On Friday, I went to San Francisco to spend the day with an old friend from the legislature. John Vasconcellos was around the legislative process for almost 40 years. He's been through a couple of transformations in his lifetime but has been a consistent supporter of the California Master Plan for Higher Education -which, at the time it was adopted, was a monumental set of plans for building a very strong higher education system in California.

The Master Plan actually is a continuous process in California from much earlier than when the "landmark" plan was adopted in 1960. But the 1960 plan was a pretty remarkable set of ideas. Since the Donohoe Act was adopted California's population has grown by 130%, the number of high school graduates has grown by just under 200%, number of undergraduates by 311% and the number of degrees produced by 439%. That was, in part, because the leaders of the time recognized that the coming decades would require more college educated workers. At the same time they recognized that establishing a slightly better definition of what each of the public sector institutions (UC,CSU and the Community Colleges) did would assure that resources were used effectively. At the same time an underlying assumption of the plan was that there would be a vibrant independent sector of higher education that would work mostly cooperatively with their public counterparts.

But in the last decade California has slipped a lot. We are slipping in terms of the number of high school students who go on to higher education and in the number of students who enter and complete a degree. So as our economy has demanded more college educated employees we've done a lot of importing of graduates - from other states and other countries. The Public Policy Institute of California did a superb report this Spring which wondered whether we could continue in that trend.

Vasconcellos has an idea to re-establish the principles of the Master Plan- he has a legacy project that he developed after he was termed out and this is one of his interest areas. So a group of us got together to think about how that might happen. Clearly the state benefitted from the investments we made in higher education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But in the last decade the state has clearly declined.

But I was reminded about the state of our commitment to necessaries when I drove back. From a location near San Francisco State, when I left at 2:30 PM, it took five hours to get home. That is a distance of 114 miles - so the drive was about 20 miles an hour. Admittedly, part of the problem was Friday afternoon a couple of weeks before Labor Day but if it is tough to drive on the state's highways it is also tough to assure that every student has a chance to go to college (and to graduate).