| US: The California 'master plan' for higher education | |
 "In 1960 California developed a Master Plan for its already famed public higher education system. It was and continues to be arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education," writes John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow and deputy director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, in a just-published paper. "Despite popular belief, however, the California Master Plan for Higher Education is more important for what it preserved than what it created." In its abstract From Chaos to Order and Back? A Revisionist Reflection on the California Master Plan for Higher Education at 50 and Thoughts About its Future says there is much confusion regarding exactly how the Master Plan came about, what it said and did not say, and what portions of it are still relevant today. Douglass' essay provides a brief historical tour on how California developed its pioneering higher education system, what the 1960 Master Plan accomplished, and a discussion on the current problems facing this system in the midst of the Great Recession. "The immense success of California's network of public colleges and universities has been its historic accomplishment of what I have called in a previous book The California Idea: the goal of broad access combined with the development of high quality, mission differentiated, and |
