by\u00a0AIDAN WYROUGH<\/p>\n
Faced with growing concerns that California\u2019s higher education system is outdated and unresponsive to the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, lawmakers are considering more structural changes to the state\u00a0Master Plan\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0vision of university and college education.<\/p>\n This year a quartet of bills authored by authored by\u00a0Assemblymember David Alvarez<\/a>\u00a0(D-San Diego) and Assemblymember\u00a0Esmeralda Soria<\/a>\u00a0(D-Merced)\u00a0are proposing<\/a>\u00a0to allow community colleges to offer even more baccalaureate programs and the CSU system to offer more doctoral degrees.<\/p>\n \u201cFor more than 60 years, the Master Plan has guided California\u2019s higher education\u00a0system,\u201d Alvarez said in a statement. \u201cBut our economy, our population, and our\u00a0workforce needs have evolved. This package updates our higher education framework to\u00a0reflect today\u2019s realities. It expands access to affordable bachelor\u2019s and doctoral degrees.<\/p>\n The outcome of education must be aligned to the jobs, and these bills remove outdated\u00a0barriers that prevent students from accessing opportunities in their own communities.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the California State University (CSU) system can already award some doctoral degrees, the scope of their offerings is limited to those that do not duplicate those provided by the University of California (UC).<\/p>\n For more than 60 years, the Master Plan has guided California\u2019s higher education system\u2026This package updates our higher education framework to reflect today\u2019s realities.<\/p>\n That restriction would go away under\u00a0AB 2693<\/a>\u00a0(Alvarez), which removes the requirement that the UC must approve any PhD offerings the CSU provides.<\/p>\n Restrictions on the California Community Colleges (CCC) system would also change under AB 2694, which would overturn a law that bars community colleges from offering a BA\/BS degree if a similar program exists anywhere in the state.\u00a0AB 2694<\/a>\u00a0(Alvarez) would bar duplication \u201conly within the same geographic region where there are documented unmet regional workforce needs.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAB 2694 ensures that when there is a documented workforce shortage, whether in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, or technology, community colleges can respond,\u201d<\/p>\n Alvarez said. \u201cStudents should not be forced into expensive private institutions or out of their region because of rigid, outdated rules.\u201d<\/p>\n Soria\u2019s measure (AB 2301<\/a>) would establish a pilot program authorizing up to 10 community college districts to offer a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), in an effort to address California\u2019s nursing shortage.<\/p>\n Another Alvarez bill (AB 664<\/a>) would allow Southwestern College in South San Diego County to offer up to four workforce-aligned bachelor\u2019s degree programs.<\/p>\n If any of these measures are successful, it won\u2019t\u00a0 be the first time the Master Plan has been altered.<\/p>\n Created in 1960 under Gov. Edmund G. \u201cPat\u201d Brown, the Master Plan sought to adjudicate and delineate student pathways by allotting all high school graduates to be eligible for enrollment in community college, for the top 33 percent to be eligible for a CSU and the top 12.5 percent to be eligible for the UC system.<\/p>\n The three systems also had distinctly different missions.<\/p>\n The UC was intended to be the state\u2019s primary scientific research institution as well as offering degrees in liberal arts, the law and medicine. It was also the only one of the three allowed to offer doctoral degrees.<\/p>\n The CSU mission was to provide baccalaureate and master\u2019s degrees in a variety of fields across the liberal arts, sciences and teacher education.<\/p>\n Perhaps most distinctively, the California Community Colleges system was intended focus on workforce training, adult education, remedial coursework and lower level academic degrees that were guaranteed pathways to acceptance at a four-year institution.<\/p>\n The Master Plan has been updated a number of times, notably in 1999 with the passage of\u00a0AB 1570<\/a>, required the California Postsecondary Education Commission to develop a comprehensive data base to be used in assessing and addressing higher education issues and policy.<\/p>\n In 2014, lawmakers endorsed\u00a0SB 850<\/a>, a pilot program which gave community colleges the ability to offer certain bachelor\u2019s programs. In 2021 lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed\u00a0AB 927<\/a>, which made the program permanent.<\/p>\n Dr. Steven Brint<\/a>\u00a0of UC Riverside, who has written widely on higher education and taught at Yale, New York University and Boston College, says the primary incentive for community colleges to offer these programs is \u201cto make their institutions more attractive to students who want a higher level degree,\u201d which would make them more popular in their regions.<\/p>\n But he also notes that these changes are not welcomed by everyone.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, the higher tier institutions aren\u2019t going like it,\u201d Brint said.<\/p>\n There is a good reason for that, says Dr. Christine Miller, Sacramento State professor and previous\u00a0chair of the CSU Academic Senate<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons behind the Master Plan was for managing the state allocations needed to fund each of the three systems\u2019 missions. And as the mission erodes, the allocations shift,\u201d she says. \u201cFollow the money. New competition could mean one system losing the standing to argue they ought to get those resources over another system.\u201d<\/p>\n Brint also voiced concern that altering the basic structure of the community college system and the type of student that system has traditionally served could negatively impact the potential output of their programs.<\/p>\n \u201cSo many people have trouble getting through community college for a whole wide variety of reasons,\u201d Brint said. \u201cThey have professors that are mostly not full-time professors, they so often have confusing curricula [and] many of the people at community college have only one foot in and they\u2019re working full-time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFollow the money. New competition could mean one system losing the standing to argue they ought to get those resources over another system.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller says there is also a major difference in teaching loads for professors, which would also directly impact students.<\/p>\n \u201cTeaching loads for community college instructors are more like high school,\u201d she said. \u201cThey might have five or six classes.\u201d<\/p>\n That can be very different for at higher levels, where a CSU professor, depending on the program and specific CSU, may only teach three to four classes a semester. With the demands of research at the UC, a professor there might teach only one class a year.<\/p>\n She called it a heavy ask to then ask a community college instructor to teach to the baccalaureate level for that many classes.<\/p>\n She believes these changes could radically impact the individual missions of each of the systems. Miller says this is not necessarily a bad thing and evolving the Master Plan does not destroy its relevance or indicate a need for even greater wholesale changes.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there have been some expansions of the Master Plan in ways that may not have been originally envisioned. But I don\u2019t think those expansions mean that there\u2019s a wholesale rejection of the Master Plan.\u201d<\/p>\n All four bills are now in the Assembly Committee on Higher Education. The deadline to pass policy bills is April 24th.<\/p>\n Aidan Wyrough\u00a0is an intern with\u00a0Capitol Weekly\u2019s Public Policy Journalism Internship<\/a>\u00a0program.\u00a0This story was originally posted by Capitol Weekly on 4\/1\/26<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by\u00a0AIDAN WYROUGH Faced with growing concerns that California\u2019s higher education system is outdated and unresponsive to the needs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[15,121,123,122],"class_list":["post-255741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-education","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}