And the sky is grey: The ambivalent outcomes of the California Master Plan for Higher Education

Abstract

In the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, California in the United States famously combined the principles of excellence and access within a steep three‐tiered system of Higher Education. It fashioned the world's strongest system of public research universities, while creating an open access system that brought college to millions of American families for the first time. Since 1960, the Master Plan has been admired and influential across the world. Yet the political and fiscal conditions supporting the Master Plan have now evaporated. California turns away hundreds of thousands of prospective students each year, and the University of California, facing spiralling deficits, finds it more difficult to maintain operating costs and compete with top private universities for leading researchers. The paper discusses the rise and partial fall of the Californian system as embodied in the Master Plan, and identifies general lessons for Higher Education systems.

A prize for a price? HE marketisation and the question of value

“…Since the 1990s, the main issues in US HE policy have also included multiculturalism, the values of the free market, access and accountability (Altbach et al, 2011). The complexity of HE in the United States has generated considerable variations in policy at state level, ranging from the historical influence of the 1960s California Master Plan at University of California Berkeley, to community impact initiatives by the University of Michigan in response to the collapse of the automobile industry (Callejo Perez and Ode, 2013; Marginson, 2017). Such variations occur in the context of a general trend towards an increased role for federal and state government, accompanied by a trend towards decreased autonomy for many HEIs, particularly in community education.…”