The Incredible Shrinking University

Andy Sabl pointed me to a lengthy article on the fate of UC entitled “Mission Shrinking.” An excerpt with a link to the full article is below. You can get the tone from the brief excerpt.

Mission Shrinking, Diana Jean Schemo, Dec. 7, 2010

In the galaxy of public higher education, the University of California system once shined as a kind of North Star. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Golden State’s premier institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles and at Berkeley, boasted some of the strongest research and teaching faculties in the world. A UC education was virtually free to state residents.

That model is under assault. Over the last two years, with the state facing a $20 billion deficit, the University of California system lost 20 percent of its state funding — nearly 1 billion dollars. Recently, California’s outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger restored some of that money. But it is unclear that the university will entirely recover from the major cuts, and the consequences thus far have included steep increases in student tuition, totaling 57 percent over the last two years…

Full article is at http://www.remappingdebate.org/print?content=node%2F273

There must be something hopeful in all of this: