Most Americans today need some education beyond high school to secure a well-paying job, and higher education is a key factor in social and economic mobility. But higher education is not accessible to all students. To further equalize opportunity, states must understand options for improving the way they fund higher education. America's public…

The coronavirus pandemic has led to the most difficult semester in generations on college campuses across the United States. With that semester now wrapping up, public colleges and universities are facing costs that already dwarf the $7.6 billion in federal stimulus funds that are on their way to these institutions. Absent dramatic new action from…

Conventional wisdom suggests that local educators tend to be wary of efforts by the state to gather more information from their institutions, due to the burdens that such requests often entail. But California's current education landscape, with its shift from state to local control of funding and accountability in the K-12 system, its massive…

The State of Higher Education for Black Californians is the first in the Campaign for College Opportunity's series of reports on the current state of college access and completion for California's Black; Latinx; and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders. The state of higher education reports also discuss the implications of…

American public higher education is in trouble. Besieged by declining state and Federal support for more than 30 years, public colleges and universities are facing a "game-changing" set of challenges that threaten to alter the very nature of the institutions. As two recessions withered state budgets in the first decade of the 21st…

2010 marks the 50th anniversary of California's famed Master Plan for Higher Education, arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education. This essay builds on the analysis offered in a previous CSHE research paper ("From Chaos to Order and Back") by…

A survey of undergraduate and graduate health education students assessed their knowledge of and participation in the California legislative system. Results justified the creation of a curriculum that would equip health education students with the knowledge and skills necessary to intervene effectively with the governmental policymaking process.…

This study discusses four states: California, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota considered by scholars to have provided their state universities with great autonomy from state government through their constitutions and matched them with four states: Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Wisconsin, which have distinguished universities of a similar size…

The Reagan administration in California used what some considered inflammatory rhetoric and seemed rigid, but in actual dealings it impressed many observers as flexible and willing to compromise. (Author/IRT)

A study was done of Californians' attitudes toward public higher education and its future in comparison to attitudes across the nation. The study conducted eight focus groups in California and used those findings to generate hypotheses tested through two telephone surveys. A California survey was conducted with 832 residents 18 years of age or…

Outlines financial problems encountered in California's plan to create three new medical schools and make improvements to two existing schools. Problems stem from inflation, bureaucratic delays in spending appropriated money, and compliance with new seismic and occupational safety standards. (GS)

Unlike in the K?12 education sector, where state and local spending eclipses national participation, the federal government has become the primary source of postsecondary education support for U.S. college students. In this Washington-centric context, accentuated by recent steep rises in tuition and other education-related costs, this report seeks…

Tightening State budgets, political ambitions and academic frustrations have marked the decline of public higher education in California. (Editor)

In 1985, the California legislature directed the California Postsecondary Education Commission to study the attrition rate of students in engineering education in order to learn if ethnic minority and women students had a higher drop-out rate than all engineering students and, if so, to determine the reasons for their high attrition. In that…

Ronald Reagan's effect on higher education as governor of California and what effect he might have on U.S. colleges and universities if elected president are described. Three points are discussed: deep conservatism of Reagan, his passivity, and Reagan's relative disinterest in higher education. (MLW)