What Happens In California Matters
Over the past fifty years, few states have been able to harness the power of higher education to drive growth and improve the quality of life for its residents quite like California.
The state set its course in 1960, by adopting a Master Plan for Higher Education that landed it on the cover ofTime magazine. The plan spelled out who should be guaranteed access to which state institutions and placed the state’s fast-growing but unorganized web of public colleges into three well-defined tiers: the top high-school graduates and research functions went to the University of California, the middle graduates to the California State University System, and the rest to the state’s community colleges.
It was a plan admired and emulated by many other states, and one that held true to its origins until recent budget troubles in the state put it under incredible strain. Still, California’s public higher-education system remains the best in the country, and it has more public research universities than any other state. It is no accident that many of the advances of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century have emanated from
The state set its course in 1960, by adopting a Master Plan for Higher Education that landed it on the cover ofTime magazine. The plan spelled out who should be guaranteed access to which state institutions and placed the state’s fast-growing but unorganized web of public colleges into three well-defined tiers: the top high-school graduates and research functions went to the University of California, the middle graduates to the California State University System, and the rest to the state’s community colleges.
It was a plan admired and emulated by many other states, and one that held true to its origins until recent budget troubles in the state put it under incredible strain. Still, California’s public higher-education system remains the best in the country, and it has more public research universities than any other state. It is no accident that many of the advances of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century have emanated from
