ABSTRACT
Public higher education was valued as a high priority and spared drastic budget cuts. Public higher education expenditures by 2011 were at their lowest proportion of California general funds expenditures ever: 11.9 percent. Following the budget cuts, it is questionable whether every campus can offer enough courses for students to complete their bachelor’s degree in four years. Because of class shortages, there is pressure to reduce major course requirements. Administrations are now pressuring faculty to reduce course requirements in academic majors and substitute non-required courses for core requirements. The endgame of progressive budget cuts is the privatizing of public higher education. The first flaw in privatization is that it presumes all colleges and universities have a wide range of funding streams and, therefore, can be independent of state funds, like the University of California, Berkeley, which is a comprehensive research university.
