State High Education Reforms Urged

A bipartisan advocacy group urged California policymakers Wednesday to explore reforming higher education, raising student fees for those who can afford it and increasing government spending to avert a potential crisis in access to the state’s community colleges and public universities.

California has growing numbers of young adults reaching college age, but “the state has not planned sufficiently to make sure that these young people can actually get a college education,” said Abdi Soltani, executive director for the Campaign for College Opportunity.

The advocacy group -- founded by organizations including the California Business Roundtable and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund -- based its case on two new reports that it commissioned.

Written mainly by Nancy Shulock, director of Cal State Sacramento’s Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy, the reports focused on disparities among students of varying ethnic groups and from different parts of the state. Shulock also reviewed options for paying for rising college enrollments.

The reports cited the much-documented differences among ethnic groups in college attendance and performance. For example, Shulock said that 60% of California’s Asian Americans between 18 and 24 are enrolled in college. That compares with 43% of whites, 32% of African Americans and 22% of Latinos.

To keep college participation rates from falling in coming years as Latinos account for an increasing portion of the state’s students, Shulock’s research envisions raising annual spending on college instruction by 26%, before inflation, over the next decade.

That would bring instructional expenses to $15.4 billion a year, while undergraduate enrollment at the state’s community college, Cal State and University of California campuses rises over the decade from 2.3 million to a projected 2.8 million.

Shulock and leaders of the Campaign for College Opportunity urged policymakers to consider meeting those costs with a combination of measures including state appropriation increases and student fee increases offset by financial aid for the needy.

The reports also envisioned reforms, including some already being tried, such as efforts to speed student transfers from community colleges to Cal State and University of California campuses and to reduce the amount of remedial education needed by entering college students.

Steve D. Boilard, director of the higher education unit of the legislative analyst’s office, hailed the reports for recognizing that the number of Californians who eventually will attend college depends on policy choices facing state officials.

“In contrast to some arguments that are made about the so-called tidal wave of college students expected over the next few years,” Boilard said, “this report says that the overall student participation rate is expected to actually decline unless there are changes to higher education policy and funding.”