DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Back to
$chool By Andy Kroll
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 Mount 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 the Washington DC 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.
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