California

The huge American state of California, long known for its exemplary higher education system under the famed 1960 Master Plan (formally known as the Donahoe Higher Education Act), is currently struggling to sustain its historic promise of broad access to higher education: to provide ‘abundant collegiate opportunities for [all] qualified young people’ (California, 1960: 27). The Master Plan was also established to protect the state against what was considered to be unhealthy competition among the three public ‘segments’ ¹ of its higher education system and to promote cooperation to meet the diverse higher education needs of the state (California, 1960). In recent decades, rapidly changing demographics, polarised politics, a lack of executive level attention to higher education and of authoritative statewide planning for it, a slower growing economy than in the past that is also subject to greater swings, together with a particularly volatile tax structure, have taken their toll. As in other US states, budget allocations over recent decades suggest a reduced priority for higher education compared to other major state functions, especially health care, primary and secondary education, and criminal justice. Even with recent increases in state support for higher education in California, it is unlikely the state’s colleges and universities will recover to pre-recession funding levels. If the Governor’s proposed 2014–15 budget is adopted, which includes spending increases of about 4 per cent on higher education, ‘state dollars for the University of California system will be 14 per cent less than they were before the recession, while the California State University system will get 16 per cent less than it did in 2008’ (Kelderman, 2014).