UC Stays on Top
A new opinion piece from our co-chairs Dick Ackerman and Mel Levine ran in Fox & Hounds on September 19, 2016. Here’s an excerpt:
UC Berkeley and UCLA sit atop the new U.S. News and World Report rankings of the top public universities in the nation. Six of the top ten public universities are UC schools, and all nine UC campuses made the list of America’s best public universities. UC Merced, the newest UC campus, joined the list for the first time. The University’s excellence should be a source of pride to all Californians, but that achievement is not something that we can afford to take for granted.
Football teams can’t stand on their laurels, and neither can top flight universities. Higher education institutions have to compete for the best faculty and students. They require up-to-date curricula, facilities and equipment. They have to adapt to changing cultural and economic realities, and they have to keep up with the growth in qualified applicants. The incoming class at UC will be the most diverse in history, in the context of the university adding almost 8,000 more California students than last year. All these actions must be accomplished within the framework of increasingly constrained finances.
The miracle is that UC has been able to maintain its high standing and performance throughout the system in the face of decades of reduced State funding. Per pupil State funding is half of what it was in the 1980s.
Read the complete article, “UC Stays on Top,” on the Fox & Hounds website.