The California Master Plan: History

50 years ago today the California Legislature signed into law the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. In honor of the anniversary of this seminal document, I’ll be doing a series of posts on important Plan elements, starting today with a brief history.

In the late 1950s, California higher education leaders knew they were facing a student enrollment boom unlike any they had ever seen. The Baby Boom generation was on the precipice of college age and, while only 4 percent of college-age Americans actually went to college in 1900, that figure had soared to 39 percent by 1960. The best demographic projections available at the time predicted enrollment in California public colleges and universities was going to triple between 1960 and 1970.

They were wrong: It quadrupled. In a single decade, California colleges and universities added more than 600,000 students to their halls. Through a miraculous combination of good leadership, timely planning, and a common understanding that what was good for young people was good for the state, California was ready for this “Tidal Wave” of students.

Things could have worked out differently. In the 1950s the state was racked with in-fighting among its public institutions, plagued by parochial political interests directing resources from seats of power in the Legislature, and lost in looking for a leader who could unite disparate warring factions. The state had commissioned blue ribbon panels in 1932, 1948, 1955, and 1957 to study higher education in the state and offer recommendations for coordination and launch joint efforts for improvement. Each illustrious panel reached its conclusions, offered its recommendations, and was soon ignored.

The state planning process was a mess. In 1943 the state legislature forced the University of California Board of Regents to take over Santa Barbara State College against their wishes. The university responded by threatening to take over more. In 1955 state congressmen, eager to bring a state college or university to their own district, proposed a bill that would have established 19 new campuses statewide, including one dubbed “Frog U” because it was to be located at the site of a Mark Twain story about a frog-jumping contest. During the next legislative session, in 1957, congressmen proposed 17 new state college sites. They approved four of them, including one earning the nickname “Turkey Tech” because it was located in a rural area known only for its prevalence of turkey farms and for being represented by the Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Education. To approve Turkey Tech, the legislature ignored specific expansion recommendations from a joint state college and university panel.

Meanwhile, individual institutions were practically ungoverned. Each state college had its own admissions standard. Many of these institutions wanted to shed their traditional role of providing bachelor’s degrees in favor of awarding more prestigious Master’s and doctoral degrees. They began adding academic departments outside of their traditional fields of education and nursing, and they wanted to develop their research capacities. Pat Brown, a candidate for governor in 1958, gave voice to these ambitions at a campaign stop where he committed to making the state colleges into university campuses.

The universities, endowed with constitutional authority, fought these developments in order to protect their historical dominance over research, Master’s and doctoral degrees, and a broader liberal arts curriculum. The community colleges, which already enrolled twice as many students as the universities and 60 percent more than the state colleges, were the forgotten ones. On a per student basis, the community colleges were making do with 66 percent of the state colleges’ funding and 28 percent of the universities’. Unlike their state college and university peer institutions, community colleges had no access to state funds for capital investments to upgrade their facilities or establish new campuses.

Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California and an experienced negotiator, later called The Master Plan a “treaty” between the warring factions. His leadership landed him on the cover of Time, and the structure of Kerr’s Master Plan, with only modest changes, has been in place ever since.

Looking back, it’s hard to see it as the revolutionary document that it was. To begin with, it was the first of its kind. No other state had sat down to figure out what to do with its higher education institutions, hammered out a compromise, and formalized it into law. That’s what California did in 1960, and now every state drafts their own, new, “Master Plan” every few years. The tripartite system it created, and the peace it formed among the sectors, has been formally studied by the OECD (culminating in a book), Japan, China, Norway, Sweden, and Brazil.

The delicately balanced tripartite system that the Master Plan codified now exists in many states, albeit in varying governance structures. At the top of the pyramid are the large research universities. Commonly called the “flagship” institutions, these universities award the majority of all doctoral degrees given in the US, and they receive about two-thirds of all federal funds for academic research. Next comes the state colleges. These are often former normal schools that are still tasked with educating teachers, nurses, and other career-specific liberal arts programs. These institutions do some research, but receive far fewer dollars to do so, and they typically only award Master’s and doctoral degrees in their traditional fields of teaching and nursing. At the bottom of the pyramid are the community and technical colleges. These are generally tasked with enrolling all interested and qualified persons and doing so at a low cost. The segments often have their own supervision and accountability policies, and most states have some type of over-arching structure with limited policy guidance and budget review.

California, more so than other states, created concrete definitions for which types of students should enroll at which types of institution. Students in the top 12.5 percent of their graduation class, as defined by standardized test scores and high school GPA, were eligible for the UC. It retained its sole place in the state constitution. The California State University institutions were to take students between the top one-eighth and the top third of high school graduates. Everybody else was left to fend for themselves at the community colleges.

The University of California retained its dominance over research, the California State Universities were given the opportunity to partner with UC institutions to offer Master’s degrees, and the community colleges were to work on getting students ready to transfer to a four-year institution, which would restrict their incoming freshmen classes in order to reserve space for transfer students.

It was the land of opportunity and the California Dream, and it worked to solve the immediate problems the state faced. Unfortunately, the Master Plan was only meant to cover the years 1960 to 1975, and it’s never been significantly updated. Look for more posts in the coming days as I examine specific elements of the Master Plan and how they’ve evolved over the past 50 years.

Tagged as: 50th Anniversary, California Master Plan, Clark Kerr