By Donna Hemmila

David Doerr, a staff consultant to the Assembly Committee on Governmental Organization in 1960, holds an original copy of the bill that put the California Master Plan for Higher Education into action.

California can't afford to break the promise of the Master Plan for Higher Education even in times of extreme financial crisis, according to higher education experts who participated in a panel in Sacramento Monday (April 26).

The California Higher Education Master Plan at 50, sponsored by the University of California Office of the President, explored the legacy of the 50-year-old higher education blueprint and its relevancy today. About 80 people attended the noon event, including Assembly members Marty Block, Jim Nielsen and Ira Ruskin, who all serve on the joint legislative committee currently reviewing the Master Plan, and former state Sen. John Vasconcellos.

At the anniversary of the signing of the Donohoe Act, the legislation that put the Master Plan into action in April 1960, some policymakers question whether the plan still has value in light of California's budget crisis and a projected shortage of 1 million college educated workers.

"How are we going to keep the implicit social contract of the Master Plan?" asked panel member Brian Murphy, president of De Anza College. "It has become a core value of the state, and if we were to take it back now, it would be catastrophic."

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The panel also included John Douglass, senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education and Donald Gerth, retired California State University, Sacramento president and a researcher who helped with the drafting of the Master Plan. Murphy was the chief legislative consultant for the review of the Master Plan and community college reforms in the 1980s.

"Before 1960 there was almost a free-for-all among legislators and a fight between UC and the state colleges on where colleges should go," Douglass said in assessing the importance of the Master Plan.

The differentiation of the missions of the three higher education segments existed before 1960, he said, but the documents weren't all gathered into one statute. The Master Plan reinforced the role of UC as the public research institution and grantor of doctoral degrees, the CSU as a institution of teacher and professional education and grantor of master's degrees in the arts and sciences and the community colleges as open-access two-year schools.

Some of the things people associate with the Master Plan were deliberately left out of the legislation, Douglass said. The legislation contains no promise of free tuition or a mandate for UC to draw applicants from the top 12.5 percent of graduating seniors while CSU taps the top 33 percent and community colleges admit everyone. Legislators and then-Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown knew that the plan would have to evolve over time and adapt to changing economics and state demographics, he said, so they wanted the plan to be flexible.

Whether the promise that every Californian would have access to an affordable college education is in the statute or not, Douglass said, there is an implied promise to the people of California that there will be a place in higher education for everyone who want one.

Panel members agreed that the three higher education systems face severe capacity challenges tied to the lack of state funding, but that challenge isn't insurmountable.

"We need to stand back and ask ourselves how we can educate more students with less money for each student,"  Gerth said. "There are things that can be explored such as the three-year degree."

Gerth called for a stronger state coordinating body to address issues such as transfer between community colleges and the four-year institutions.

The panel offered other solutions such as increasing tax revenue and student fees and for the federal government to take a bigger role in funding higher education. They also said they'd like to see all candidates for governor to make higher education a state priority.

"I think there is a real call to action here around revenue," said panel moderator Audrey Diaz, from the nonprofit Campaign for College Opportunity. "... We're at a point where our institutions are still gems. We're still competitive. We've got to make some decisions quick before we're not."

Donna Hemmila is managing editor with the UC Office of the President Integrated Communications. For more information, visit the UC Newsroom or follow us on Twitter.