Column: Californians are flunking higher ed
On June 24, 2015, the LA Daily News ran a column by Joe Mathews on funding for California’s system of public higher education. Here’s an excerpt:
The biggest force luring people to California over our history has been our abundance of cheap, high-quality public education. California pioneered such educational access very early — by 1912, Berkeley was already the largest public university in the world. University degrees on the cheap were a great money saver; we stole away smart people from other places and only had to subsidize four years of their education (instead of 13 years in K-12).
The result of this policy: for most of the 20th century, Californians weren’t just better looking than other Americans — we were smarter too, with the highest rate of college graduates. But, then in the second half of the 20th century, we forgot what we had. The state locked in lower tax rates and higher spending by ballot measure, at the expense of public investment in our world-class university system. The universities made it up by adding tuition fees. Today, we Californians still look great — but we’re not as smart. We’ve fallen out of the top 10 of U.S. states by percentage of adults with college degrees.
Read the rest of the column on the LA Daily News website.