Nine of the ten campuses of the University of California — led by Berkeley ― once again made it into an annual ranking of the world’s leading universities. All’s well in California higher education, it might seem.
But that is not what Pat Brown or Clark Kerr would say, were they alive today. They were, respectively, governor of the state and president of the University of California in 1960, when California adopted a “master plan” that became an international model. Their aim was not only to have excellent public universities, but to give the state’s population nearly universal and free access to them. Some pupils would so-called community colleges for a two-year vocational programme, others one of the (now 23) campuses of the California State University, and the best might go to a UC campus.
In order to assure access for all, tuition charges were banned — only “fees” for some costs other than education were allowed. Most funding was to come from taxpayers. The premise was that higher education was a public good for the state, which was nursing its own future entrepreneurs and taxpayers. As Mr. Kerr put it, the universities were “bait to be hung in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.”
That consensus has been overturned. In 1990, the state paid 78% of the cost of educating each student. That ratio dropped to 47% last year, and will fall even more during the current academic year, after the latest round of budget cuts, overseen by Jerry Brown, the current governor and son of Pat Brown. In some ways, California has now inverted the priorities of the older Brown’s era. Spending on prisons passed spending on universities in around 2004.
This has led to concerns that public universities might lose their excellence. It takes money to attract the best professors, and the best students follow them. An alternative to worse public universities, however, is quasi-privatized ones. That seems to be the route taken in California.
Thus students will this year, for the first time, pay more for tuition than the state gives in funding. This follows years of tuition fee increases far steeper than the average at American public universities. A place at a UC campus can easily now cost $13,000, or $31000 including housing, given California’s high costs.
To raise other revenues, the various campuses also admit ever more out-of-state students (who pay three times more) and, target rich graduates for more donations. Led by the business and law schools, they behave increasingly like private universities, in other words. This strategy retains pockets of excellence. But it also runs counter to the philosophy of the master plan, by pricing ever more Californian families out of a place. The state now ranks 41st in the number of college degrees awarded for every 100 of its high school graduates.
1.Pat Brown and Clark Kerr attempted to set up excellent public universities, as well as（ ）.
2.What does Mr. Kerr imply by saying “bait” to be hung in front of industry (Line 4, Para. 3)?
3.What is the concern on the public universities since the state spending on universities has dropped?
4.Campuses in California receive students from other states for the purpose of （ ）.
5.What can we infer from the passage about higher education in California?
