CA millions of degrees short
New report: Economic vitality at risk
Business and civic leaders weighed in on the condition of California’s university and college systems with an urgent warning that without a significant increase in graduation rates, the state will lose its prominence as an economic contender.
A new report released Thursday by the California Competes Council found that the state needs 5 ½ million new college degrees and technical certificates by the year 2025. But, without major changes, California will fall 2.3 million short.
(Source: California Competes and U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 American Community Survey). Click to enlarge.
“We need to provide our young people with the tools, not only to live a good life and be good participants in our state, but to also fuel our economic engine,” said Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, chair of the Council, during a conference call with reporters.
The Council’s report, entitled The Road Ahead: Higher education, California’s promise, and our future economy, is the third in a confluence of reports focusing on improving success at the state’s community colleges this year, this time from the perspective of business and civic leaders. In January, the Community College Board of Governors approved a package of 22 recommendations developed after a year of meetings and public hearings by the Student Success Task Force.
A month later, the Little Hoover Commission, the state watchdog agency, released its recommendations for community colleges in Serving Students, Serving California.
All three reports share some ideas. They would give more independence to the Chancellor’s office, provide more support for new students, and call for greater accountability. The Council states up front that it supports the recommendations of the other two groups, but goes on to say that they “do not go far enough in addressing the lack of accountability in the system caused by dysfunctional governance.”
They call their report a blueprint for the governor and State Legislature and lay out steps the state must take “to restore California to national and international prominence as a producer of high-quality college graduates.”
More and better quality degrees
Producing 5.5 million new graduates by 2025 means increasing the number of degrees and certificates by a little over 4 percent a year. The Council says this could be accomplished by better research into the types of jobs and qualifications needed to fill them in different regions of the state. The report notes that “there are increasing numbers of good jobs across a range of industries that demand skills gained in credential programs of less than four years,” and that “the state should identify majors that are a priority.”
Community colleges are a key strategy in meeting the demand. With about 2.6 million students, they are the largest higher education system in the nation, but rank second to last in completion rates, according to the report. That combination makes community colleges the low-hanging fruit, as it were.
“Improving attainment rates for transfer, degrees, and certificates at community colleges could address a third to half of the 2.3 million graduate gap,” write the Council members.
The authors also caution against losing sight of quality. Doing things on the cheap, such as increasing class sizes, could backfire by producing graduates without the analytical and critical thinking skills they’ll need to be successful.
Create a Higher Education Investment Board
Remember CPEC, the California Postsecondary Education Commission? It didn’t work out so well and Gov. Brown disbanded it last year. The Higher Education Investment Board would be CPEC with teeth.
It wouldn’t be a governance body, said Robert Shireman, director of California Competes. Like CPEC, it would collect information and data from campuses about the number of degrees granted from each campus, how much it costs to educate students for different degrees, and what the workforce needs are for different regions of the state, and use that information to advise the governor and Legislature on policy.
Unlike CPEC, the Board would have authority to compel each campus to respond to its requests for data because it would also have control of student financial aid, like Cal Grants.
“Campuses did not have any incentive to respond to requests of CPEC because there weren’t any consequences,” said Shireman. “The scholarship program is a hook into institutions that they need to be responsive.
Streamline governance
“The statewide Board of Governors should amend its regulations to restore clear accountability to local boards of trustees and to the administrators who report to them.” – California Competes.
In a significant shift from the other two reports, the Council proposed reconfiguring the management structure of community colleges to give local Boards of Trustees more power over policy.
Currently, under AB 1725, passed in 1988, local community college districts must ensure that faculty, staff, and students are allowed to participate in governance. Two years later, the Board of Governors went further with regulations that call for “mutual agreement” between the local trustees and faculty senates on issues pertaining to curriculum and academic standards.
The Council, while acknowledging that faculty input is important, said that by giving academic senates equal authority, it’s nearly impossible to reach any agreements.
“We really debated on the governance question and came away with the feeling that the accountability structure of community colleges really needed to be strengthened in order to move forward and address this gap in degrees and certificates,” said California’s former legislative analyst and council member Elizabeth Hill.
As far as the statewide academic senate is concerned, the Council based that recommendation on a blatantly mistaken understanding of the regulation. “My jaw dropped when I read that section of the report,” said Michelle Pilati, president of the statewide Academic Senate and a professor at Rio Hondo College. “It’s disappointing to see that the authors of the report did not adequately check their facts.” Except for the changes implemented by the Board of Governors in 1990, Pilati said local trustees can opt to reach a mutual agreement with their faculty senates, but are under no obligation to do so.
Members of the student senate took issue with the portrayal of faculty as the obstacle to change and cautioned against using divisive language. “It’s a mischaracterization and in line with all the other demonization of teachers that we’re seeing in K-12,” said Rich Copenhagen, a student senator from the College of Alameda. “Unfortunately I think this report falls into that, and I don’t think that’s a very healthy way of dealing with our problems.”
The Community College Chancellor’s office said it supports any effort to improve completion rates, but was noncommittal on the report’s recommendations and instead directed attention to the Student Success Task Force. Some key proposals from the task force are already making their way through the State Legislature in SB 1456, the Student Success Act of 2012.
And finally the logic comes full circle. The kids graduating with something less than 4 year degrees in 2025 are the ones who have been entering Kindergarten over the past few years. You know, those years we have been cutting billions in K-14 education funding and raising college tuition costs.
‘The report notes that “there are increasing numbers of good jobs across a range of industries that demand skills gained in credential programs of less than four years,” ‘
That text is a bit troubling. I expect that these jobs are not so much in addition to any current, good, better-paying jobs, but are likely a replacement for those jobs. If so, that means, by definition a lower income populace, which is generally associated with a lower achieving student population. That may make it very difficult to produce better quality graduates. We’ll see..
And finally:
‘The authors also caution against losing sight of quality. Doing things on the cheap, such as increasing class sizes, could backfire by producing graduates without the analytical and critical thinking skills they’ll need to be successful.’
Um, not sure whether separation of church and state allows me to say this about educational policy, but HALLELUJA!!! Could this really be the glimmer of hope that business does actually see the value in smaller class sizes and long-term investment in public education in general? Spread the word! :-)
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Community Colleges are starving for funds and desperately trying to keep the doors open as wide as possible in an era of dramatically increasing demand and dramatically declining budgets. They tend to be the lost stepchildren of our education system, neither K-12 nor university, but they are hugely important: in every community, accessible to all, valuable to people of any educational level who want to collect new skills. They need a strong commitment from the state and the communities they serve so they can in turn serve us.
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I’m not sure how making note of a mistake is “striking a nerve”. As a teacher, I would not survive for long if that were the case. There are no instances where our Board of Governors has mandated the use of “mutual agreement” for anything. Here is what I communicated to the author:
It’s disappointing to see that the authors of the report did not adequately check their facts. Local boards are not obligated to mutually agree with local senates on all decisions. They are required to engage in collegial consultation with their local senates on issues that fall within the senate’s purview. The local board may opt to “mutually agree” on specified items, but it is not required to do so – and has the ability, in most instances, to take action absent mutual agreement. The few exceptions to this are found in Education Code, not Title 5 regulations.
I also made note of some points that the report got right – but it seems that that was not worth sharing.
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Michelle, Following some email conversations with you, I have deleted the sentence about “striking a nerve,” and added new, stronger language that you provided this morning.
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The business leaders seek all manner of tax breaks. But, at the same time they lament the sorry state of higher education in California. Perhaps, if they looked in the mirror, they would see where the problem lies.
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Mark – I assume your comments infer that tax breaks mean less money for education? If you read the article, you’ll notice this isnt about funding as much as it is about reforming the system. All three tiers of higher ed — but especially the community college system – need to reform the way they deliver education and make sure it’s relevant to the market.
Speaking of which, this is also about the economy. You can’t blame everything on the lack of funding – that’s an intellectually lazy position. While we are all worried about having too few graduates, no one is talking about how our cohorts of graduates are totally unemployed or underemployed. Funding higher ed is important but that also affects the economy. Making the system work efficiently and implementing policies that help the economy (yes, that includes tax breaks for those who create jobs) is a more sound strategy.
Looking at education funding in a vacuum isn’t helping anyone.
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I am mystified by this “report” and confounded by what it calls for.
The author of this article reports that “The Council says this could be accomplished by better research into the types of jobs and qualifications needed to fill them in different regions of the state.” So what? How is this information going to be transferred to high school students so that they can then go into those jobs? Is the Council suggesting that we have a state agency that works solely to prod 16-year-olds to take a particular career path so that the business community has a ready pool of labor? And what about the lead time that it takes to get there? I cannot see our current socioeconomical system able to direct our citizenry in that direction. Not even the Soviet Union at its most efficient could do that.
Let’s take the claim about the needed 2.3 million of “certificates and degrees produced.” How does one figure out if the state has the capacity to produce this number of degrees? The simplest is to look at the current production of graduates in the state. If one is to believe the UC/CSU PR, they produce from 150 to 160,000 graduates each year (the number of high school graduates is roughly 400,000 annually). In 13 years, that works out to roughly 2 million persons with college degrees. Given current funding, that number will not increase.
The Council has a modeling tool in their web site. By moving the sliders to the “ave. performance of top 3 states” in all categories, the number of hypothetically produced additional degrees is met. The problem is that the model predicts that the vast majority of new degrees will not be Bachelors, but a combination of Associates and Certificates. Are these the “quality” degrees that the Council envisions will be needed? I have no idea. But if their model is “right,” then the vast majority of California workers is not expected to get a four-year degree. This is hardly the model of a “knowledge economy.”
The model claims that nearly 1 million Bachelors will be granted through a combination of higher numbers in high school graduates and going directly to a college from high school. But where are these greater numbers of students going to go if the UC/CSU are not funded to admit them? The model’s creators seem to have engaged in wishful thinking not based on any reality that I am aware of. Where is a Clark Kerr when you need him?
No, I am not going to address what is the current under/un-employment. Questioning those numbers would not, in my opinion, shed much light on the magical thinking employed by this Council. Instead, it might show that “the invisible hand of the market” does not know what it is doing. Worse, it might even show that the business community wants to have a surplus in the labor pool in order to ensure downward pressure on wages and benefits. And there are abundant anecdotes in the technical fields that this is the case.
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Trying to wend your way through the hallways of the legislature is always difficult because of the crowds of business “leaders” hurrying to lobby for raising taxes in CA so the state can support education at a level that will provide the number of graduates business says it needs.
Wait a minute…no those were crowds of guys in camo lobbying for legislation that will allow them to hunt bears with dogs..or something like that.
The first situation is, obviously, a fantasy. The second actually happened a few weeks ago.
This report sounds as if it came from some parallel universe. Community colleges have shed some 300,000 students since 2009 because kids can’t get classes. The CSU system is expected to turn away 16,000 students, most of them college ready transfers from the community colleges, because of cuts to their budgets. A recent study from a Stanford group projects that the UC system will be totally without state funding, aka. privatized, by 2024 because of a steady reduction in state funding.
All of this because CA has very average levels of combined taxes and very high (#2 in the US) cost of living and cost of providing services. BUT! We can’t really talk about funding because there’s always something to talk about first: restructuring, reorganizing, being more efficient, and so on and so on. Just, whatever you do, don’t mention that CA funds its schools at about the same level as those cradles of civilization: Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.
In Jack Nicholson’s famous words; “You can’t handle the truth!”
And, sure let’s cut all of those pesky community college instructors out of the decision making process at the community colleges. Who do they think they are–community college instructors?
And: “It’s a mischaracterization and in line with all the other demonization of teachers that we’re seeing in K-12,” said Rich Copenhagen, a student senator from the College of Alameda”
A wise young man. Don’t ever say CA community college students can’t think critically and then speak truth to power.
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A real problem for community colleges is that they are counter-cyclical with the economy – that is, when times are bad, as they are now, demand skyrockets between kids dropping down to community college as an alternative to the four year schools and unemployed people coming back for retraining.
When the economy gets better, demand for community college will ease a bit.
People want to use their community colleges. They want to take classes (and presumably they want to do well). There’s a no vacancy sign out front right now.
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