Abstract
The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries, brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s strongest system of public research universities. The California idea, combining excellence with access within a tiered system of higher education, and underpinned by a taxpayer consensus on the common good inherent in equality of opportunity in education, became the leading model for higher education across the world. Yet the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. The taxpayer consensus broke down two decades after the Master Plan began and California no longer provides the fiscal conditions necessary to ensure both excellence and access, especially access for non-white and immigrant families. Many students are now turned away, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face resource challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader in the United States, lags far behind. The article traces the rise and partial fall of the Californian system of higher education as embodied in the Master Plan, and draws out lessons for other countries in general, and China in particular.
Keywords
* This article is based on a lecture/seminar delivered in the Institute of Education at Tsinghua University, Beijing, 3 November 2016. Thank you to Professor Jinghuan Shi, Dr Wen Wen and Ms Lili Yang. Most of the material was drawn from the author’s book The Dream is Over: The crisis of Clark Kerr’s California idea of higher education (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2016), available online as a free download at http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.17.
1 The Master Plan in California
The later 1950s and the 1960s were an extraordinary time in the United States. The period climaxed in the explosion of ideas, identities, popular culture and political rebellion in the second half of the 1960s. That great outpouring of civil energy in America, brilliant and sustained, has tended to block from view the decade before, marked by rising expectations and all-round creativity in many spheres, including universities, research, ideas, and government itself. Government was the site of positive action for the public good, the collective well-being of society. Government did not carry the stigma it later acquired in the United States. It was the time of the civil rights movement and of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Both government and critics wanted to make a better world. Both believed that this was possible.
In higher education, there was the 1960 “Master Plan” in California. In his historical account of economic and social inequality, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014), 1 Thomas Piketty shows that special and unusual circumstances after 1945 in the modernized industrial countries opened the way to greater social mobility and a larger role for social allocation via higher education.
Before World War
Clark Kerr and the Negotiation of the Master Plan
Nowhere in the world was higher education practiced on a larger scale, and with more original thought and far-reaching innovation, than in fast growing California, the largest American state. The central figure in fashioning higher education in California was Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley from 1952 to 1957, and President of the University of California from 1958 to 1967. Kerr was the principal architect of the 1960 “Master Plan,” the best known of all blueprints for system organization, one that helped to shape higher education across the country and across the world, and the author of what is still the best and most influential book on modern research universities, The Uses of the University (2001a/1963). 5
Clark Kerr was the principal architect, instigator, negotiator, advocate and public face of the California Master Plan for Higher Education. The immediate conditions for a plan were clear. There was a growth crisis in California but the state had enough money to finance an expanding higher education system. There was unregulated sprawl and competition between sectors of education, with no clear division of labour. The question was, what plan—or rather, whose plan? The universities’? The state colleges’? The politicians’? Kerr “realized that the University needed to take the lead in building a consensus, particularly if the University wanted to maintain its unique role in the tripartite system” (Douglass, 2000, p. 248). 6 The Plan was not so much a system blueprint as a hard-negotiated bargain between contending parties.
The strategy of the University [of California] was clear. Our three new campuses … along with the expansion of programs at Davis, Santa Barbara, and Riverside, were adequate to fill an anticipated void in facilities for training PhDs and conducting research and in the political map of fast-growing population areas without a
In the bargaining, Kerr and the University of California came out on top. Though the colleges gained coherence and autonomy as a sector, they were unable to secure the research role and doctoral degrees that they wanted. California already had nine percent of the nation’s population but 15 percent of its elite research universities, argued Kerr (Douglass, 2000, p. 184). 8 It did not need more research universities. Kerr worked hard to ensure the University would protect its near monopoly of research, holding his nerve as the deadline for final agreement was approached.
Excellence and Access
The policy hallmark, normative power and lasting achievement of the Master Plan was that it explicitly combined the principles of excellence and access and made this work in practice. Until 1960 these had been largely seen as opposing principles but Kerr and the Master Planners showed that it was possible to have both within a single system. The Master Plan established a three-tier structure to achieve both principles.
The elite University of California secured its role as excellent by monopolizing the public investment in research and recruiting only from the top 12.5 percent of the high school graduate cohort. The
At the time, the revolutionary change was open access. The Plan guaranteed that there would be a place in college for every high school graduate or person otherwise qualified who chose to attend. In 1960, 45 percent of California’s college-age population matriculated to a higher education institution. The national average was about 25 percent. The Master Plan promised to keep California ahead of the country. It endorsed the continued growth of participation, in response to both economic need and popular demand, which were not distinguished. It proposed a tripling of the enrolment by 1975. It appeared to suggest that with access barriers gone and upward mobility secured, there would be social equality of opportunity through higher education. The promise of access is now a policy commonplace in many countries. But it was the 1960 Master Plan in California that started this.
While universal access was attractive, in fiscal terms it was not as lavish as it might appear. For the first 15 years, the Master Plan promised to save money by shifting part of the expected growth from four-year to two-year institutions (Douglass, 2000, pp. 287-289). 9 Community colleges were to be established within commuting distance of almost every resident in the state but they were less expensive than research universities.
The Public Mission
The California Master Plan says much about the commitment of then Californian society, and perhaps American society, to the collective public good in higher education—that sense of social solidarity that long sustained American democracy (though often also hidden beneath an individualist veneer) and was expressed by the great system builders in American higher education, some in the states and some in the federal sphere. The mentality of Clark Kerr and his contemporaries was very different to the neoliberal mindset, with its veneration of the blind justice of the economic market, that later came to dominate much of American public life. It was public vision and public dollars that built the California system (just as it is the nation-state and planning that has built modern higher education in China). If California had left the task of building to the market, the state would still be waiting.
The Master Plan was quintessentially public in its commitment to universal access, and in its systemic character, in the organizing of three sub-sectors on the basis of a division of labour. All three tiers embodied the public good mission and its ideas of democratic openness and service to all citizens. The Plan also was structured collectively; it embodied the idea of higher education as more than a set of individual institutions. These were inter-dependent institutions operating within the framework of common public structures and committed to a single set of planning ideas. Institutions, and within them individual schools and research groups, competed with each other, but within structured limits. It was a major departure from the idea of university as stand-alone firm which was then influential in the American private sector, and is more dominant in much of the thinking about higher education today.
The Plan also did something else of interest to universities everywhere. It sustained the long-term autonomy of higher education in a highly politicized state. It meant that provided all sectors kept to the rules, higher education could more or less regulate itself. The constituent campuses of the University of California were protected by the Office of the President from the direct interference that plagued public universities in other states. Legally, the
The autonomy of the institutions did not necessarily contradict the public character of the Master Plan. Californian higher education was positioned as a kind of public civil society, universal but separate from government. The public connectivity of the institutions was sustained through both their relations with their boards and their direct dealings with the world but they could choose the ways in which they would be socially responsive. This was a different kind of “public” to that of direct government administration: democratic in purpose, access and transparency, and in the range of social engagement, but closed to electoral contest or political capture.
Yet the institutions could not retreat too far from public responsibility. The trust inherent in the Master Plan rested on the capacity of universities and colleges to identify and meet emerging social needs on a voluntary basis, to listen to vocal groups, and to also keep on persuading them that higher education for all was the California way. They had to become advocates for access and excellence. In this gift economy, what the higher education institutions offered to the public, jointly and severally, were the gifts of mass education, meritocracy, discovery and intellectual leadership. The two-year colleges provided an open door to all comers, undertaking to provide for the literacy of California as well as its social opportunities. The elite
In the public non-market form production, there is no natural limit to the volume and quality of outputs. There are merely opportunity costs, when within a bundle of finite resources one course of action is chosen over another. There are also limits to the imagination, but this is less of a constraint in research universities with scope for bright people to take decentralized initiatives. In return the
The Outcome: Excellence
How then did the different components of the California Master Plan fare after 1960? Imagined social forms never shine as brightly in practice as their ideal version would suggest. Large-scale and far-reaching constructions fail more than most. All the same, there are no iron laws. The distance between idea and reality, the extent of the failure of the plan, varies from case to case. In the case of Californian Higher Education, the political, fiscal and social conditions are now very different to those of 1960. There is continuing commitment to some aspects of the vision but not others. Despite this, the division of labour between the three sub-sectors has proven stable, more so in many other countries which have seen upward “academic drift” from the lower tiers.
In California, the multiversity has travelled better than has the overall system design. The goal of excellence has been realized more completely than access. Equality of opportunity through public education seems a long way off.
The University of California has sustained unquestionable research excellence across all campuses, except
Research output of University of California campuses (usa ), Stanford University (usa ) and Tsinghua University (China), 2011-14 compared to 2006-09
The University of Leiden Centre for Science and Technology Studies (
Despite this stellar achievement, state funding cuts, especially after the 2008-2009 recession, mean that the
The Outcome: Access
Moving from the excellence objective to the access objective, the picture is more mixed. The
The
However, the
Internally, the Plan under-estimated growth, and the effects of growth on the balance between tiers. After 1960, the Californian population grew more rapidly than predicted, and the growth of social demand for higher education outstripped demographic growth. The Plan itself lifted aspirations. However, the continued scope for egalitarian access depended on the capacity of the schools to bring students from all Californian communities and social groups to the starting gate for higher education, on the capacity of community colleges to bring students through to successful completion, on the scope for upward transfer from the community colleges through to the
The growing costs also locked in the balance between sectors. As planned in 1960, growth was concentrated in the community colleges. The
The external factors within California were the state’s changing ethnic demography, growing inequality, fiscal politics, and growing social and economic inequality in the country as a whole. In 1970 California was 77 percent white, 12 percent Latino, 7 percent Afro-American and just 3 percent Asian or Pacific Islander. This distribution changed dramatically. In 2010, 40 percent of California was white, 38 percent was Latino, many first-generation migrants, 13 percent Asian-Pacific, and 6 percent African-American, with a high white concentration in the wealthiest part of the population. The Latino population was much younger than the white population: 51 percent of Grade 6 in the public schools was Latino, 27 percent white, 11 percent Asian/Pacific and 7 percent African-American. Though Latinos were 43 percent of high school graduates in 2009 they were just 28 percent of students in public higher education, and 16 percent in the University of California. In the
Latino and African-American school populations, like most ethnic groups, have mixed class locations, but they are disproportionately concentrated in under-funded schools in poor communities. In 2012, 79 percent of all high school students who started in 2008-09 had graduated, with 8 percent still at school. Latinos had a school graduation rate of 73 percent, and African-Americans students only 66 percent.
Graduation and transfer rates in the community colleges mirror the regional and ethnic inequalities apparent in the school system. Access, retention, graduation and transfer all sharply favor the white middle class. It is far from the 1960 promise of equal opportunity. By 1995 upward transfer rates from community colleges to the
2 American Political Limits to the Master Plan
However, ethnicity and poverty in California became associated not just with inequality in education but with the fracture of the social and political consensus on education as a public good that underpinned taxpayer support for the Master Plan.
Taxation as Theft
The 1970s tax revolt in California and other states was impelled by the deep seated belief held by many Americans that taxation for all but a minimal set of public goods, such as national defence, was illegitimate. Such beliefs, never entirely absent in the United States, gathered an increasing support from the mid 1970s onwards.
In 1978, the anti-tax movement in California broke through by securing a ballot majority for Proposition 13, which sharply reduced property taxes, the main source of income for local counties and school districts. When the state moved to protect schools, cities and local communities, this placed the rest of the budget in jeopardy, including higher education. A host of further tax cutting and tax-related measures followed. In 1988, partly to compensate for Proposition 13, California adopted Proposition 88, which allocated 40 percent of state income to schools and community colleges. After all the spending mandates and tax limitations had been accounted for, only 15 percent of the budget was unallocated. The three public higher education systems were funded out of that 15 percent. Proposition 13 and the tax revolt showed that the ageing white middle class was unwilling to resource schooling of good quality across all districts, for all citizens and non-citizens, including legal and illegal migrants (Pelfrey, 2012, p. 70). 20
The full impact on higher education was not felt immediately. It accumulated. Periods of growing state revenue alternated with funding cuts that were not fully restored. From 1990 it was apparent that California could no longer fully support the Master Plan. Then the 2008-2009 recession triggered a massive fiscal decline that was passed on to all three systems. Much of the reduction looks to be permanent.
In terms of the principles that shaped the Master Plan, the most significant outcome of the reduction in the fiscal base was that public higher education in California could no longer provide for universal access. The community colleges first began to turn away students in bad budget years in the 1980s. Now, in the mid 2010s, at least 200,000 potential students each year miss out on a place.
California is no longer the national model for high participation higher education. In 1960 state participation was double the national average. In 2010 California was 43rd state of the 50 in the proportion of 18-24 year olds with Baccalaureate status.
Clark Kerr would have been only half pleased at the outcome of his work. For 55 years, the Master Plan has functioned well in the research multiversities, providing for excellence limited only by the imagination, and combining elite academic entry with high social access. It has failed across higher education as a whole to provide universal access or to sustain the quality of mass higher education amid expanding participation. In the end the execution of the Master Plan faltered where the original Plan was strong—in the big picture, in the economics and politics. California has lost the public values that sustained the 1960s belief in universal social advance through higher education, and understood taxation as a shared asset that is used for the common good of each and all, rather than as a reduction in individual freedoms.
Weakened Commitment to the Common Good
But why did support for the common public good deteriorate in California and in the United States? The ideas underpinning the tax revolt began in Cold War strategic circles in the United States. In 1951 defence intellectual Kenneth Arrow (1963) published a paper on “Social choice and individual values,” which inquired into whether it was possible to derive collectively rational decisions from the aggregation of individuals’ preferences. 22 Arrow used set theory to prove that when two or more individuals were making decisions over three or more alternatives, it was logically impossible to derive collectively rational group decisions from the individual preferences, whether through voting, social welfare policy or markets. There was no prospect of achieving a common decision consistent with every person’s individual preferences. In instances of collective decision-making, one or the other assumption would have to give way—either the outcome of individual preferences would not be collectively rational, or individuals would lose their freedom to determine personal ends. There could be no such thing as “the public good” without violating individual freedoms. This became known as the “impossibility theorem.”
Crucially, Arrow’s argument was grounded in his starting position: that methodological individualism prevailed, meaning that all goods were individualized, there were no collective social goods distinct from the aggregation of individual goods (Lukes, 1973; Amadae, 2003, p. 122); 23 that individuals made rational decisions based on utility; that their preferences were unrestricted and inviolable; and these preferences were incomparable (Amadae, 2003, p. 84 and pp. 103-104). 24 The impossibility theorem assumed that autarkic individual freedom was absolute. The shared conditions enabling that freedom to be exercised and enjoyed were taken for granted—even though such social conditions would be fatally undermined when all persons pursued their absolute self-interest without regard for others. However, the pure logic of Arrow’s ultra-individualist rejection of Soviet collectivism appealed to many in the United States (p. 106). Arrow’s ideas were taken further by James Buchanan, the principal creator of public choice theory. Buchanan opposed himself to what he called the “normative delusion” that “the state was, somehow, a benevolent entity and those who made decisions on behalf of the state were guided by consideration of the general or public interest” (Buchanan, 1997, p. 85). 25
Ideas matter. With Ronald Reagan, the public choice theorists had a president willing to put their arguments into action. Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan stating that government was not the solution, it was the problem, was the exact reversal of the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, which had raised expectations of government and drew public support for large collective solutions of the type of the California Master Plan. In setting himself against the notion of a common public interest, Reagan reduced taxation on high incomes and capital gains, reduced spending on social programmes, including federal education funding, and weakened unions in the workplace, opening a surge in executive incomes. The top tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. The increase in measured income inequality in the United States dates from 1980.
Income Inequality After 1980
Since 1980 there has been extraordinary growth in the inequality of private incomes and wealth in the United States, freed up by the evacuation of the public good. Growing inequality has reworked the conditions, character and potentials of public higher education, increasingly pulling it away from the world that Clark Kerr and his colleagues inhabited and served, in which the Master Plan was a practical solution.
In the Anglo-American countries, the concentration of wealth and income in hands of each of the top 10 percent, top 1 percent, top 0.1 percent and top 0.01 percent—that is, one in every ten thousand persons—have risen very considerably since 1980, especially at the very top (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2013; Dorling, 2014;
What primarily characterizes the United States at the moment is a record level of the inequality of income from labor (probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large) together with a level of inequality of wealth less extreme than the levels observed in traditional societies or in Europe in the period 1900-1910.
In the Nordic countries in the 1970s, the most equal modern societies, the top 1 percent received about 7 percent of all income. In Europe in 2010, the top 1 percent received 10 percent, in the United States 20 percent, same level as in the aristocratic societies of late nineteenth century Europe (Piketty, 2014, pp. 247-249).
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However, the more modern form of salary-based inequality is legitimated by an element of merit. It is seen as the product of hard work, not just property and capital, though as the role of networks in elite graduate recruitment shows, competition for high labour incomes is not a level playing field. Piketty calls the United States “a ‘hypermeritocratic society’ ”—or at least, “a society that the people at the top like to describe as hypermeritocratic … a very inegalitarian society, but one in which the peak of the income hierarchy is dominated by very high incomes from labor rather than by inherited wealth” (pp. 264-265). The argument that wage inequality in the
Income Inequality and Higher Education
In the United States, as in the rest of the English-speaking world, the rapid growth of economic and social inequality is occurring in societies in which formal participation in higher education is at or near an historic high. According to
Education and growing income inequality are joined in ways other than the human capital equations, through the process of social reproduction. The intrinsic limit to equality of opportunity, in any era, is the persistence of irreducible differences between families in their economic, social and cultural resources. The growing inequality of incomes and wealth in the United States magnifies the effects of unequal social backgrounds on educational outcomes. In turn educational inequality tends to reproduce and enhance prior social and economic inequalities. In the highly stratified American higher education system these reproductive effects are further enhanced.
At the bottom end, low income recipients, accessing low value colleges in the educational hierarchy, find that as inequality increases higher education becomes both more expensive and less useful as a means of occupational and social mobility. Both the social and economic value of mass public higher education, and the capacity and motivation of its users both tend to become emptied out. The participation rate in
In 2013, a near-universal 77 percent of persons in the top family income quartile in the United States had completed a Bachelor degree by age 24 years. In this quartile, the graduation rate had almost doubled since 1970, increasing from 40 to 77 percent in 1970. In the bottom family income quartile, the graduation rate had again risen, but from 6 percent in 1970 to only 9 percent in 2013. In the second bottom quartile, the graduation rate was 17 percent in 2013 (The PELL Institute, 2015, p. 31). 37 Thus the overwhelming majority of the bottom half of the population in income terms had not achieved graduation by age 24 years. However, the overwhelming majority of top quartile people had done so.
These national patterns better explain the faltering of institutional funding and quality in California since the 1980s, and the attenuated completion and transfer rates in the community colleges and the California State University. In Degrees of Inequality (2014), political scientist Suzanne Mettler find: “Over the past thirty years … our system of higher education has gone from facilitating upward mobility to exacerbating social inequality.” Higher education fosters a society that “increasingly resembles a caste system: it takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and it widens the divisions between them and makes them more rigid.” Higher education “stratifies Americans by income group rather than providing them with ladders of opportunity” (Mettler, 2014, pp. 4-5, p. 8). 38 In this external setting, it was inevitable that the Master Plan’s access mission would falter. At the same time, the failure of the Plan was accentuated by its internal structural limitations.
3 Lessons from California
Political cultures and state strategies vary greatly across the world. In the United States, they have varied greatly between the generations. The tragedy of American public higher education, once such a shining example in the nation, is that its democratic promise, its contribution to self-determining individual freedom and fulfilment—which is the philosophical centrepiece of both the American political right and the political left—has been so far reduced. The American paradox is that the nation in its normal business of life regularly overturns its own ideals. In a sense, the hyper inequality of the last generation is typical of the United States—yet so was the real commitment to equality of opportunity that went before it. In that sense the faltering of the Master Plan both negated the national character, and fulfilled it. Yet the influence of American ideals is not confined to America or stymied by their domestic failure. The 1960s American coupling of excellence and access, the world-class research university together with open participation and a ladder of educational opportunity, continues to set benchmarks for higher education in many countries.
The Master Plan might have faltered in California, but since 1960 its influence has never ceased to spread across the world. Amid rising participation and greater policy emphases on basic science and research-led innovation, the comprehensive research multiversity that Clark Kerr described in The Uses of the University is now more clearly paradigmatic in higher education everywhere. This is apparent in three ways. First, a growing proportion of science is found in comprehensive research universities rather than separated academies. Second, in some though not all countries, non-university second sectors, institutions that specialize in a narrow group of disciplines, and institutions offering elite teaching and professional training without research, have been folded into research universities (Salmi, 2009; Huang, 2015). 39 Third, many governments have implemented funding and performance management policies designed to elevate the globally-referenced research outcomes of designated elite institutions (“World-Class Universities”).
What are the lessons of the successes and failures of the Master Plan for Higher Education in California? The larger lessons, for all systems in all countries, are three-fold. First, steep structural stratification in higher education weakens the potential for both social equity and educational equity, especially for families positioned at the base of the social pyramid, while it also tends to empty out the social value of mass higher education, further undermining equity (Marginson, 2016). 40 The Nordic systems, German-speaking countries and Dutch higher education all provide better democratic structures than American higher education. Perhaps because the American revolution predated the French revolution by 15 years, the United States never completely broke with the idea of aristocracy that it inherited from Britain. The hyper-meritocracy of the income earning elite, legitimated by Ivy league colleges and postgraduate business degrees, is a form of modernised aristocracy—at least to the extent that American tax laws permit the transmission of family wealth down the generations. The Ivy League institutions parallel the class they serve. Educational aristocracy, a strange echo of feudalism in modernity, legitimates not only unequal educational outcomes but the underlying social and economic inequalities as well.
Second, it is easier to sustain a national consensus about the public good mission of stellar research universities than about universal high quality mass higher education, for both social-cultural and economic-fiscal reasons. But shared social values are essential if public higher education is to fulfil both missions, those of social inclusion and equalisation.
Third, and most importantly, a progressive taxation system, coupled with firm egalitarian policy in states not controlled by corporations and privileged families, is the lynchpin of commitment to the common good.
Lessons for China
What are the lessons specifically for China? Higher education in China has many features in common with California. Both involve large, regionally uneven and institutionally complex systems, though the scale of China is many times greater. Both use institutional classifications to manage a firm hierarchical division of labour between types of institutions. In both that hierarchy is steep by comparison with the countries of Western Europe, in terms of institutional status and resources. In both the creation of a layer of leading global research multiversities has been of crucial importance to policy makers, university leaders and the society at large. Both attempt to ensure some social equality in access to the leading universities through extensive financial aid in the leading universities, though affluent families play the leading role. In both societies, the affluent classes have gained stronger social influence over time. There are differences. The
The Californian model was dynamic during its period of most rapid development in the 1960s and 1970s. The Post-Confucian model of China has been at least equally dynamic since the late 1990s. In China R&D spending rose from 0.91 percent of
The dynamism of the 1960 Master Plan in California was sustained by economic growth; by consensus about the familial and national benefits of higher education, and by consensus about the public good benefits of expanding opportunity on an accessible basis. There was high dependence on public money but at first enough resources to support low tuition and infrastructure. The institutions managed their own evolution in response to need, within the systemic plan. The dynamism of the modern Post-Confucian Model of higher education in China (Marginson, 2013)
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is conditioned and sustained by economic growth; it continues to be rooted in Confucian educational cultivation and ambition in the home, and a broad social consensus about the familial and national benefits of higher education; and it secures the largest part of its momentum from a modernizing state determined to direct priorities and sustain the pace of educational and scientific progress. There is more private funding in China than in 1960
Perhaps the most important educational system-wide lesson of California for China is the need to focus not only on lifting the tier one institutions to the global peak but on improving institutions in the second and third tier. California’s second and third tier institutions eventually went not forwards but backwards. In the long run the quality of mass higher education is as important as the quality of
At the same time, as in California, in China the capacity of higher education to broaden opportunity, and even enhance social equality through educational mechanisms alone, is constrained by forms and degree of inequality in the larger social environment. This feeds back into the structuring of the education system, especially when it shapes the political outlook at the top, affecting public taxation and spending priorities—prior social and economic inequalities all too readily govern the distribution of good quality schooling and no doubt feed into the steepness of the hierarchy in higher education. California shows that when the institutional hierarchy is steep that puts too much pressure on the transfer function. It is much better to retain more modest differences in the quality of institutions from the bottom up, by elevating the lower tiers without reducing the quality of the top research universities. But this more egalitarian system structure, one more typical of Netherlands or Sweden than California, is only possible if political and social habits will permit it.
California also provides China with a political economic warning. Periods of rapid expansion of the middle class, in which economic growth and modernization sustain a broad-based opening of paths for new layers of the population, do not last forever. The
As the growth of the middle class slows, equitable structures in education and public policy become more essential in sustaining the social consensus, and sustaining equity in education itself. It is crucial to maintain broad taxpayer support for open opportunity in higher education. It is equally essential that government remains firmly focused on both excellence and access in higher education when those ideals become harder to sustain. In China state policy on higher education and science is always crucial, even more than in California. China since the Qin and Han has depended primarily on the state not only as the driver in education but as the motor of social and economic progress. In the modern era, especially since 1949, the state’s commitment to the maintenance of order and the spread and growth of prosperity, through the institutions of education and other sectors, has been joined to a broad commitment to the whole people. Much turns on the depth of that commitment and its successful translation into educational structures. Perhaps the idea of higher education for the public good will be more robust in China than it was in California.
Footnotes
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
14 John Douglass, To Grow or Not to Grow? A Post-Great Recession Synopsis of the Political, Financial, and Social Contract Challenges Facing the University of California (Research and Occasional Paper 
).
21 John Douglass, To Grow or not to Grow? A Post-Great Recession Synopsis of the Political, Financial, and Social Contract Challenges Facing the University of California (Research and Occasional Paper ), 61-84.
23 Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973); S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold-War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
24 Ibid.
26 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, ); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (Penguin: London, 2013); Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1% (London: Verso, 2014); Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development,
28 Emmanuel Saez, “Striking it Richer,” The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Department of Economics (2013), accessed 31 March 2017, .
29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development,
31 Ibid.
33 David Autor, Lawrence Katz and Melissa Kearney, “Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 90, no. 2 (2008): 300-323; Ted Mouw and Arne Kalleberg, “Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 3 (2010): 402-431; Edward Wolff and Ajit Zacharias, “Class Structure and Economic Inequality,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, no. 37 (): 1381-1406.