In 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Educationcreated an ambitious, yet pragmatic, statewide architecture to give every Californian an affordable pathway to a university degree.
But today, the pragmatic aims of the Master Plan have been scrambled. A recent mandate for equal outcomes has pulled research faculty hired to work at the frontier into teaching high-school material. The key driver of this little-known agreement between Sacramento and the University of California, the 2022-2027 Multi-Year Compact. Signed in the midst of the pandemic recovery, the Compact ties new state funding to a set of institutional requirements.
Although radical for its time, the 1960 Master Plan was realistic in seeing education as a limited, valuable resource: It committed to a tuition-free education but acknowledged that taxpayers picked up the tab, requiring that education dollars be allocated efficiently. It tasked different institutions—community colleges, state schools, and the UCs—with different kinds of educational responsibilities to ensure equity of access without sacrificing cutting edge research.
The Master Plan’s coherence requires that students be accurately matched to, and therefore prepared for, the institutions they attend. Yet the UCs, which are at the heart of the plan, have lost this focus. Largely as a consequence of the 2022 Compact, they have been tasked with the impossible: Teach students needing high school remediation while simultaneously attempting to provide cutting edge education to those operating at the frontier.