From Institutions to Individuals: A Paradigm Shift for California’s Master Plan for Higher Education

A more moderate path to a unified system

Short of formally merging the UC, CSU, and CCC into a new university system, California could make significant progress toward the vision and its hopeful outcomes by creating strong statewide and regional coordination. Such coordination would work to make transitions from K–12 and between institutions seamless, along with improving intersegmental collaboration and connections with communities and employers across the state. Students would face fewer, if any, interruptions resulting from switching institutions and moving across regions. They can keep their on-campus or off-campus housing, childcare arrangements, health insurance and other public benefits, work-study and other campus-based positions, and off-campus employment if they can stay local and pursue a higher education. Campuses, too, could leverage economies of scale and reduce unnecessary duplication by sharing infrastructure, particularly campus housing but also classrooms, labs, other instructional and research buildings and equipment, and sports and recreation facilities and venues, with other institutions within commuting range.

Robust Regional Structure

The new Master Plan acknowledges the state’s large and diverse geography, with its attendant differences in economic and cultural factors, and organizes higher education institutions by region to meet local education and employment needs and to equitably serve residents across the state. Each of the state’s regions will have a California University campus that, across multiple sites and via online education, provides postsecondary education from sub-baccalaureate certificates to doctorates, along with education for enrichment and lifelong learning. One could loosely envision that all the CCCs, CSUs, and UCs in a region merge to become the California University campus and its sites in that region, each working as a single institution to educate students. This regional structure need not start and end with higher education. For example, one proposal would establish entire regional systems of education and work, including county offices of education (representing K–12) and employers, as well as public and private institutions of higher education. The partner organizations would form regional consortia to establish targets for education and career readiness and to align programs and pathways to meet local workforce needs (for details, see Shulock, Moore, & Tan, 2014). With guidance from a dedicated source of labor market information, consortium partners would collaborate to offer work-based learning opportunities and would streamline offerings by eliminating duplicate programs. For efficiency’s sake, relatively few institutions would offer the most specialized programs, and online instruction (within or across regions) would fill gaps in local course and program offerings. The state would distribute funding by region rather than by education system and would monitor each consortium’s progress toward its education and employment goals. (For another vision that would replace the Master Plan’s organization of higher education segments with regional collaborations of higher education and K–12, see Breneman, 1998.)

Offering postsecondary educational options across the state is not just a matter of enhancing choice and convenience—it is a vital step toward ensuring equity as well as the other tenets of accessibility, affordability, meaningful education, and adaptability. Today, distance can be a substantial barrier to postsecondary enrollment. Few individuals change residences to enroll in college, and among the 70 percent of US students at public institutions, most attend campuses within 11 miles of home.⁵⁹ In fact, proximity to a postsecondary institution is a consistent predictor of college attendance for both traditional-age students⁶⁰ and adults 25 and older.⁶¹

In the regionally organized state postsecondary system of the future, few students will have to move or commute long distances to earn bachelor’s and graduate degrees that today are offered only at the CSU, the UC, and a small number of CCC campuses. Put another way, prospective undergraduate and graduate students in all regions will have equal access to programs at top institutions, whereas today, UC and to a lesser extent CSU campuses are concentrated in the state’s coastal and urban areas. No student will lose credits transferring across public institutions because there is only one system and therefore no such thing as transfer. Local resources that are currently unequally distributed across the state (e.g., the multibillion dollar endowments of UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSF; UC’s vast library holdings; UC’s prestigious medical and professional schools) would be more equitably accessible and could allow more Californians to learn, engage, and thrive.

Notably, the regional structure does not imply that every campus and region will have identical offerings or that students would be required to attend the campus closest to home. To the contrary, individual campuses will continue to offer specialized programs that reflect local industries (e.g., agriculture in the central and Sacramento valleys, entertainment in Los Angeles). Students will be free to enroll in other regions of the state to pursue such fields or for any other reason. But for most Californians, crossing regions to attend college will be a choice rather than a necessity.

In addition to bolstering equity, the state’s regional postsecondary structure will further the new Master Plan’s other guiding principles described above. Offering an extensive selection of programs in each region will bolster accessibility and affordability by sparing students the expense and difficulty of moving. Workers seeking to advance in their careers can continue with their same employers (or clients if they are self-employed) while they are enrolled, eliminating the need to find other means of support, avoiding potential disruption to their career paths, and opening up avenues to meaningfully apply their education to their work and vice versa. And endowing institutions across the state with an identical mission and governance structure and with adequate and equitably distributed resources will permit them to focus more on developing better ways to serve students and their communities and less on competing for a bigger share of funding, prestige, and status.

Connection to Careers

The new Master Plan also puts first and foremost the primary goal of students and prospective students— preparation for gainful employment—by deliberately and explicitly constructing a clear line of sight from each program toward well-paying jobs. This focus on connecting college to careers not only directly addresses this primary objective of students (and their eventual employers), but also will keep students engaged along the journey⁶² and reduce disparities in employment outcomes.⁶³

This is not to say that universities will become solely job training programs, but rather that they will intentionally and systematically build career preparation into every class and certificate or degree program. Career readiness activities will take all sort of forms to meet students where they are. Introductory classes, for example, might feature guest speakers who work in related industries or whose jobs use the skills and knowledge taught in the respective courses. More advanced courses would incorporate project-based learning drawn from actual problems faced by employers in cognate fields. Outside of the classroom, institutions would elevate paid work- based learning opportunities (such as internships, apprenticeships, and cooperative education programs) to be a standard expectation for each program if not an outright requirement, similar to student teaching requirements for students in teaching credential programs. Universities could leverage themselves as employers by providing students opportunities to work as student research assistants for faculty, which is associated with both academic engagement and persistence and which promotes gender and racial equity in the sciences.⁶⁴ Institutions will strongly encourage or require early interaction with career services⁶⁵ and to develop essential career skills (such as professional networking, interviewing for jobs, and creating effective presentations) that otherwise may not be formally part of the curriculum.

Open Access With Numerous Entry Points

As the pace of technological change quickens, workers in every field from accounting to zoology experience a constant need to enhance their skills and knowledge to stay relevant, and the Master Plan for today’s students will recognize the broad need for higher education through an open access approach. Rather than restricting access to bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions to a select few high school graduates and community college transfer students, the new Master Plan structures higher education to welcome any Californian with an ability to benefit, regardless of their age, academic preparation, or educational objective, similar to the current infrastructure at CCCs, but with a transfer-free pathway to a bachelor’s degree and beyond. This arrangement is hardly novel, as today 14 states have open-access public four- year institutions.⁶⁶ Moreover, institutions have been increasingly creating guaranteed admission or direct admission approaches where they proactively notify high school graduates that they have been admitted to college.⁶⁷ These approaches further lessen the barriers to higher education that inequitably impact California’s marginalized residents. 

Some students will achieve their educational and career objectives at the certificate and associate’s degree level. Others will follow a seamless progression into specialized fields as guided by its established structures and earn bachelor’s degrees, which in turn opens the door to graduate and professional degrees. The concept of transfer, however, becomes obsolete within this envisioned system, as the educational journey unfolds seamlessly at the regional university that offers a wide range of credentials and does not require transfer from lower division to upper division.

Moreover, movement between regional universities will be more seamless than our current community college to university transfer process, as all regional universities will be a part of the same California public university system. California’s new public universities under the new Master Plan are strategically designed for ease of access, whether physically or virtually, while maintaining educational quality across all modalities.

At the same time, policymakers must take steps to ensure that this new regional configuration of institutions does not exacerbate existing disparities in college preparation and socioeconomic status across regions and does not limit access for rural students who the state has placed colleges and universities further away from.⁶⁸ If residents of Beverly Hills have greater academic or financial resources, on average, than residents of Bakersfield or Barstow, such advantages need not and should not translate into superior educational opportunities. One tack to promote equitable outcomes would be to distribute resources in a fashion that deliberately attempts to erase regional differences, investing more in less wealthy communities, monitoring progress toward this goal, and periodically adjusting spending. Other strategies, described in the following sections, would reduce the importance of geography by expanding online instruction and offering alternative versions of the residential college experience. A modernized coordinating entity, proposed later in this essay, would be instrumental in proposing funding strategies to maintain regional equity and in tracking progress toward this goal.

Such a change would not be new or unique. Several states have made efforts to minimize boundaries between higher education institutions, often in an attempt to address a financial crisis but sometimes to also improve student success. A few examples are listed below:

• Wisconsin transformed its two-year colleges into branch campuses of the four-year comprehensive institutions in 2018, with the primary goal to address budgetary issues. The regional location served as an entry point to higher education, with other administrative components centralized. While budgetary challenges persist, Wisconsin higher education leaders remain positive about the collaboration and the development of new programs that the consolidation enables.⁶⁹
• Georgia began the process of merging its public colleges in 2010, which eventually included 18 institutions, with the goal of achieving cost savings and increasing student access and success. While many successful outcomes have been attributed to the mergers directly, other improvements are less clearly tied to the mergers and may have been associated with other policies.⁷⁰
• Vermont merged three public colleges and will use a new academic model that includes sharing academic programs across campuses, reducing dependence on physical facilities, and relying heavily on hybrid forms of learning. The merger will not close any physical locations but will result in shrinking or tearing down some underutilized campus facilities. Vermont will employ a model in which courses will be delivered through a mix of in-person, virtual, and other options so that students across the state can take any course.

Flexible Learning Modalities

The new Master Plan will enable colleges and universities to more effectively leverage in-person and online instruction to improve access and learning. Even in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of US students mixed face-to-face courses with distance learning, with the number growing each year.⁷¹ The new Master Plan will extend this trend intentionally, combining in-person instruction’s strengths in facilitating interaction and building community with online instruction’s ability to reach would-be students whose location, level of physical mobility, transportation options, and work and caregiving responsibilities make them good candidates for attending online. Online education also makes it possible to offer niche and highly specialized courses and programs that are unlikely to attract a critical mass of students in any given region but are feasible to offer if students can be drawn from across the state or beyond.

None of this is to suggest that online learning is the panacea for all of the state’s higher education’s challenges. It may not be the ideal format for all students, particularly those for whom face-to- face interactions with peers and instructors are an important source of social capital and sense of belonging. Nor might it be the best choice for laboratory courses and other classes that involve substantial hands-on work. Rather, time and experience will guide institutions and systems as they develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contexts and circumstances where online instruction is most effective.

Expanded Conceptions of Campus and the Residential College Experience

Colleges will continue to offer the experience of living on campus to students who seek it, but the notion of campus will stretch to include other locations where students attend classes together and sometimes live in close proximity. For students seeking the experience of attending a traditional residential college, institutions could offer intentional group living, perhaps in a typical residence hall or on-campus apartment, or in less traditional circumstances. Innovative colleges could follow the model of Minerva University, in which undergraduates spend their first academic year in San Francisco and subsequent semesters together in cities across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.⁷² Or they could emulate recent upstart College Unbound, which keeps costs down by holding classes in rented classrooms (which are sometimes in a workplace for employees to pursue postsecondary credentials together or in other shared community spaces), supplemented with weekly in-person dinner meetings that include childcare, extensive opportunities for online interaction, and an independent study component that awards credit for out-of-classroom experiential learning.⁷³

A Debt-Free Path to Completion

None of the aforementioned aspects of the future higher education system will mean much if students cannot afford to attend, so an essential component of the new Master Plan is that students must be able to attend without working excessive hours or incurring educational debt. California may not return to the 1960s model where its public institutions charged no more than a nominal activities fee, but it can do a much better job providing financial support to cover both tuition and nontuition expenses. There are already numerous strategies to do this, and a new Master Plan will likely draw on more than one approach. I note some strategies next.

The obvious and straightforward solution to making college affordable would be to expand grant aid to fully cover the total price of attendance, including a realistic amount for living expenses, for every student who needs it. But given the cost to the state of such a policy and the continued challenges in ensuring students receive the financial aid for which they’re eligible, the new Master Plan should design multiple structures to offset students’ college costs.

One way to reduce students’ costs, while also deepening learning, would be to supplement grants with “earn and learn” programs that combine enrollment with meaningful and relevant work experience—aligning to career connections noted above. This effort could be similar to the federal work-study program with the important distinction that the work component would be related to the student’s program of study. In addition to facilitating a debt-free college experience, a concurrent earn and learn program would also smooth the transition to employment after graduation. Students would leave college with significant and relevant work experience, and employers who hire them could forgo the risk and recruitment expense by taking on a tried-and-true employee.

Another strategy would be for the state to cover a student’s financial gap if the student commits to some post-graduation work requirement, an approach already used by the armed forces in its service academies and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs.⁷⁴ A guaranteed job offer could be used as an incentive for completing a program in specialized fields, as some localities do with their police and firefighting academies. Or college could follow a period of employment, as is the case with the GI Bill and other veterans education benefits and AmeriCorps.

Regardless of how the state supports students, research suggests that spending on higher education yields a generous return, making the nontrivial state contributions toward college affordability for all Californians a smart investment. One estimate found that every dollar invested in higher education returns an estimated $4.50 in increased tax revenues.⁷⁵

Differentiated Roles and Expectations for Faculty

A unified higher education system would allow faculty to specialize to deliver the greatest benefits to students and the state. Faculty would focus on research, teaching, service, practice (for practitioners in professional fields), or some combination of these. Each category would have its teaching, research, and service expectations align with its specific category, and these expectations would guide promotion and tenure decisions. For example, a current UC faculty member may choose to be research-focused and have no or limited teaching or service obligations. On the other hand, a faculty member whose expertise lies in teaching would have their workload solely in teaching and not have any research expectations. This differentiation would allow faculty to thrive as they could dedicate their time to the role that maximizes their impact.

A Coordinating Entity for Today and Tomorrow

The new Master Plan needs an independent coordinating entity with responsibility for steering higher education policy across the state and sufficient authority and resources to drive meaningful change for higher education and workforce development. Among its more specific responsibilities, this entity would be charged with:

• ensuring transitions into college (whether from high school, work, or unemployment), such as making it easy for Californians to earn credits from prior learning, matriculate in a timely manner, and understand the pathway from beginning to end;
• making recommendations on resource allocation to meet state and regional educational goals and monitoring progress toward those ends;
• regularly collecting, analyzing, and reporting data on how state institutions’ activities align with state policy priorities;
• promoting cooperation in overlapping areas of need, such as the development of programs of study or work-based learning programs that can be shared across campuses;
• ensuring that institutions effectively meet state and regional demand for workers with specific skills and credentials, including by identifying opportunities where neighboring institutions can share instructional capacity and develop joint programs rather than jockeying for funding and enrollment;
• collecting and maintaining data that supports the state’s analytical and practical needs, such as tracking students’ education-to-work pathways, assessing program outcomes, and facilitating college applications (similar to the design of the California Cradle-to-Career Data System that is currently in development);
• administering cross-sector, interagency, and inter-institutional programs that connect to higher education;
• setting rules and distributing state student financial aid; and
• appropriating funding to each institution and designating general purposes, such as general operating support versus capital support or support for specific programs.

What Could a New Coordinating Entity Look Like?

Many possibilities exist for how California could structure a new coordinating entity. Each has pros and cons and none clearly stands out as the winner, particularly once political constraints are considered.

A Proposed Structure

One possible structure for the entity is a cabinet-level state agency that is led by a governor-appointed, senate-confirmed Secretary and would house a Department of Planning, Research, and Analysis to provide analytical support to state-level policy leadership and a Department of Inter-Agency Postsecondary Programs that would administer programs (including the provision of technical assistance) related to student aid, career education, cross-regional collaboration, and cross-sector efforts (e.g., efforts with K–12, workforce/labor, social services, and rehabilitation).

Strengthening Evidence-Based Policymaking

To support state policy leaders in higher education and workforce development, the Department of Planning, Research, and Analysis would:

• Examine needs statewide to inform policy efforts and guide the implementation of cross- sector and intersegmental state efforts related to postsecondary education and workforce development, such as transfer, dual enrollment, the CCC and CSU applied baccalaureate and CSU applied doctorate, and streamlining public benefits access and data sharing.
• Prepare comprehensive analysis and recommendations to the governor and the legislature on policy bills and budget requests that have statewide scope or intersegmental dimensions.
• Convene and engage stakeholders and experts to discuss key issues, opportunities, challenges, and recommendations.
• Explore, disseminate, and uplift strong state, regional, and local efforts to advance promising and evidence-based intersegmental and cross- sector policies, practices, and processes.

Breaking Down Organizational Siloes

With the Department of Planning, Research, and Analysis supporting policy leadership, the Department of Inter-Agency Postsecondary Programs would be responsible for implementing programs (including providing technical assistance) laid out in the new Master Plan and other cross-sector state efforts. A key strategy to do this is by bringing currently siloed state entities together under one roof, which would build organizational knowledge and expertise while reducing administrative burdens and duplication across agencies. This department would be organized in offices based on programmatic focus to allow the state to bolster its ability to administer complex programs, such as:

• The Office of Career Education to administer and provide technical assistance for cross-sector programs and initiatives that enable Californians to build the skills they need to secure good jobs. Program implementation should include the Golden State Pathways Program; California College for All Service Program; the Teacher and School Counselor Residency and Grant Program; and the many apprenticeship and job corps programs.
• The Office of Inter- and Intra-Regional Collaboration to support regional economic development, planning, and partnerships between education providers, employers, and local governments. This office would administer the K–16 Regional Collaboratives Grant Program and make recommendations on regional capital facilities programs involving educational entities, such as recent investments in affordable student housing.

The entity would collaborate with the Office of Cradle- to-Career Data to utilize available information to inform policy and practice and ensure Californians reach their education goals and understand the workforce pathways available to them.

Regardless of how it is structured, the entity or entities would have professional and administrative staff to support its functioning. These civil servants would help ensure that the benefits of the new Master Plan are distributed efficiently, equitably, and in accordance with state policy goals and would propose evidence- based reforms as needed. The entity would help implement its agenda through technical assistance to regions and by steering collaboration across regions. Offices within the department would administer programs and provide technical assistance in specific areas such as career education, regional collaboration, student aid, and the state’s Cradle-to-Career Data system, all in support of broader state goals.

Phased Implementation

A restructuring as profound as the one proposed here calls for an incremental approach to develop specifics, earn stakeholders’ buy-in and address their concerns, implement changes, evaluate the effects of these changes, and propose course corrections based on those interim assessments. The proposed new coordinating entity, with the backing of the state’s elected leaders, would be ideally positioned to steer this process.