Listen to Part of the Regents Afternoon Session of 1-22-2014

As we have noted in numerous prior posts, the Regents refuse to archive their meetings beyond one year. So we dutifully record the sessions in real time. Below is a link to part of the afternoon session of Jan. 22. This segment is mainly the Committee on Educational Policy. Gov. Brown was in attendance. We will separately (later) provide links just to certain Brown segments. But for now, we provide a continuous recording.

There was discussion of designating certain areas of UC-Merced as nature reserves, followed by discussion of a new telescope. The discussion then turned to online ed and the governor seemed to push for courses that involved no human interaction so that there could be unlimited enrollment. At a later point, Chancellor Block made a comment about the virtue of “residential” education which seemed aimed at the governor’s online push. He talked about a digital divide in which better off students would have traditional in-person classes and poor students would have mainly online offerings. There was discussion of the old Master Plan. Heads of the three segments in the Plan – UC, CSU, and the community colleges – were part of the discussion. Brown indicated that the Master Plan was a political compromise of an earlier era and that it needed to be questioned as to today’s needs.

The president of the UC Students Assn. spoke in support of a larger state budget allocation than the governor was proposing, an oil tax to fund education, divestment from fossil fuels, and other items.

You can hear this portion of the afternoon session at the link below:

The Resurrection?

[More in our Regents coverage. See earlier posts.] The Regents spent some time on the old Master Plan for Higher Ed. There was discussion, according to news reports, among representatives of UC, CSU, and the community colleges on better coordination.

…“This report shines an important light on the need to have a central body whose sole focus is guiding the Legislature, governor and our three higher education segments as we plan and build for the future,” (Assembly speaker John Pérez) said.

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-college-reports-20140123,0,5215408.story

Um, does no one remember CPEC, which still exists in ghostly form as a website (see screenshot above), after the legislature cut its budget to zero? It was supposed to be the coordinator. So will it be revived?

It’s really not so hard to recall such things!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2iIUcUL71s?feature=player_detailpage]

Q&A

The Contra Costa Times ran an interview with UC president Napolitano that was published yesterday. But apparently the interview occurred in late 2013. Here are the questions:

Q: One of your first proposals was to make tuition rates more predictable. What might that look like?

Q: At the last UC regents meeting, Gov. Jerry Brown said UC had slim chances of securing additional state funding, with all of the competing needs in Sacramento. What did you make of that?

Q: Were you surprised by the low graduation rates for some student-athletes at Cal? (UC Berkeley’s football team had the lowest graduation rate of any major program in the NCAA.)

Q: One of your initiatives is to make it simpler for community college students to transfer to UC. What are your impressions of that system?

Q: I’ve read that you were surprised by the long-standing tension between UC and some labor groups… What have you done to change that?

Q: You’ve been back to Washington. What points are you trying to press with people there in terms of higher education policy or funding?

Q: Did you expect you would have protesters at your public appearances?

The answers can be found in http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_24850169/napolitano-uc-chief-eyes-tuition-sports-transfer-students

Transfer Program With UCLA (or not)

On the one hand, there is an article that says UCLA has joined a for-profit program to encourage community college transfers:

The for-profit company Quad Learning announced Friday it has recruited UCLA and Occidental College to be part of a national community college transfer alliance — but the program doesn’t come cheap. For about twice the cost of regular tuition, American Honors gives community college students extra support, coaching and smaller classes to help them transfer to 27 partner universities, including Purdue University and Ohio State.Chris Romer, co-founder of American Honors, said the universities have agreed to be “transfer friendly” to American Honors students…

Full article at http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/12/14/15403/two-california-colleges-part-of-new-for-profit-col/

On the other hand, when you go to the reported source for this article, it is a NY Times report that makes no mention of UCLA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/education/top-students-at-community-colleges-to-have-chance-to-raise-ambitions.html

An article in Inside Higher Ed makes the same assertion as in the excerpt quoted above:

…Twenty-seven colleges, including highly selective private colleges such as Amherst and Swarthmore Colleges and selective publics like Purdue University and the University of California at [sic] Los Angeles, have joined the American Honors Network, in which they have agreed (with varying degrees of commitment) to recruit and enroll students transferring from the honors colleges established by the network’s two-year partners…

Full article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/13/major-2-year-colleges-and-selective-4-year-institutions-create-national-transfer

Not clear what the qualifier “with varying degrees of commitment” means. So is this corporate hype? Or is there a real program with UCLA? If you Google “UCLA” and “Quad Learning,” you will find the Inside Higher Ed article and the article excerpted at the top of this posting, but not more.

If you Google “UCLA” and “American Honors” and “community colleges,” all you find is a website from the company that says some students who went through the program have gotten into UCLA. But that statement – reproduced below – by itself doesn’t mean there is any formal program with UCLA. (Some former Boy Scouts have gotten into UCLA, but that doesn’t mean UCLA has a program with the Boy Scouts.)

…Students from the first American Honors class have applied and been accepted to some of the most prestigious universities in the world for transfer, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, UCLA, University of Washington, Cornell University, and more…

Excerpt above from http://ccs.americanhonors.org/international/.

Community College Transfers to UCLA

Yours truly came across a news article indicating that Santa Monica College provided more undergraduate transfers to UC than any othre community college. You can find the article at:

http://www.smmirror.com/articles/News/Santa-Monica-College-Number-One-In-Transfers-To-University-Of-California/39064

So he poked around the website for the community college system to find out which community colleges led in transfers to UCLA. The pie chart above shows the results for all community colleges providing at least 100 transfers in academic year 2012-13. [Click on the chart to enlarge and clarify.] More than half of the transfers came from colleges providing under 100 students. Santa Monica was again the leading transfer institution with Pasadena a distant second. FYI.

Losing Our Edge

Probably a different Edge

Report: Calif. losing its edge in higher education

SAN FRANCISCO — More attention must be paid to the California State University system and to the state’s community colleges if California is going to produce the educated workers its economy needs, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom says in a report set to be issued Tuesday. The report commissioned by Newsom argues that the state is losing its place as a national leader in higher education. The report, prepared by the nonpartisan Committee for Economic Development based in Washington, D.C., finds that the percentage of young adults earning associate and bachelor’s degrees in California already is below the U.S. average and predicts the trend will persist unless the system is overhauled to serve an increasingly diverse and low-income population…

Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/25/5947219/report-calif-losing-its-edge-in.html

Listen to the Regents Morning Session: Nov. 13, 2013 (including the Napolitano speech)

As noted in prior posts, yours truly is out of town and behind on listening to, and recording, the Regents meeting. I am now current through the morning of Nov. 13. That was the morning in which UC president Napolitano gave her speech on her goals for UC. Blog readers will recall that there was supposed to be a similar unveiling of goals in a speech awhile ago, but that turned out to be a booster/dud. This one was more significant, but more on that below.

Again, we provide audio archives of Regents meetings because regental policy is to preserve recordings only for one year. Why? No one will say.

The meeting started with public comments. Editorial: There is an extremely offensive group that comes and yells at the Regents about demands to fire Napolitano immediately. What they imagine they are accomplishing, other than offending everyone but themselves, is an interesting question. Obviously, the Regents are not going to fire Napolitano. She may turn out to be a good choice or a bad choice, but it’s time to get real folks and move on. They were there the day before, as blog readers will know. Apparently, they will come back. Apart from that group, there were representatives of AFSCME, which has a one-day strike scheduled for Nov. 20, and the union (UAW) that represents grad TAs. There were complaints about non-resident tuition and grad student fees. [It might be noted that towards the end of the open session, Assembly speaker Perez, an ex officio Regent, made somewhat cryptic remarks that suggested that some accommodation between the union(s) and Napolitano was under way.]

After the public comment session, there was a talk by UC-Berkeley Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman who lamented the squeeze on funding for public research universities.

The main event that got the bulk of media attention was the Napolitano speech noted above. In it she talked about concerns about affordability of UC, student aid, the one-time money she allocated from a “reserve” to undocumented DREAM students and grad students, freezing tuition for another year (2014-15), a search to avoid volatility in tuition, concern that the news media focuses on the “sticker price” of tuition rather than the actual price(s), the need for the state to do its part to pay for UC retirement plans and increased enrollment, a search for greater efficiency at UCOP, doing more to get additional funds from grants, donations, public-private partnerships, and tech transfers to industry, encouraging more community college transfers, and green energy goals for the campuses.

Editorial: Obviously, this speech was more substantive than the previous one. But it tended to avoid trade-offs. If you freeze tuition in good times, history has taught us that you get big jumps in tuition in bad times when the state pulls back. You need only to look at what happened under Governors Davis and Schwarzenegger for examples. If the governor won’t pay for increased enrollment and you encourage more community college transfers, that increase has to involve either a decrease in admissions of four year students (which she said she wants to avoid) or fewer dollars/student. Later in this session in a discussion of PhD education, Governor Brown kept saying that UC was not going to be “ten Harvards,” so comparing it with Harvard was not a selling point with him. That raises the nasty issue of whether UC is a tightly-knit system or a bunch of individual campuses in a loose federation, again a trade-off since it can’t be both. Also later in the program in a session on fund raising, it was observed that donors like their names carved on buildings, i.e., physical capital rather than human capital. In short, the speech was a shopping list of worthy goals. But it avoided priorities and nasty trade-offs. We provide a separate link to the speech below.

After the Napolitano speech, Academic Senate rep Bill Jacob reminded the Regents of the blending of research, teaching, and service. It is not possible to isolate these three elements at research universities. There was discussion of doctoral education with Brown’s “ten Harvards” comments and a review of fundraising with the lament (by Regent Lansing) of donors’ desires to see their names carved on buildings. (Suggestion by yours truly: As long as the campuses have bond-and-build bureaucracies, donors might be reminded that buildings are temporary. The bond-and-builders after a couple of decades will knock them down. You get more longevity out of programs that endow research and/or scholarships since those go on as long as there is money left in the till.)

Finally, there was a review of the Dept. of Energy labs with concerns expressed about changes in leadership on the UC side. President Napolitano mentioned the $80 million that UC is owed for retirement by the Dept. of Energy due to the federal sequester. (See our earlier post on this issue.)

UPDATE: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/nov/14/uc-board-of-regents-approves-operations-budget/ and

http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/11/jerry-brown-offers-jesuitical-harshness-to-university-of-california.html

You can find a link to the entire open morning Regents session of Nov. 13, 2013 at:

or go to https://archive.org/details/UniversityOfCaliforniaRegentsMorningNov.132013

For just the Napolitano speech, click on the link below:

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Post by CalPolicy.

Four!

In contrast to the silence the greeted the Little Hoover report on higher ed (see the previous post on this blog), a possible effort pushing for California community colleges to become four-year institutions got some attention.

From the LA Times:

California’s community college system is considering a controversial effort to offer four-year degrees, a move designed to boost the number of students who graduate and are more prepared for the workforce. The change would require legislation authorizing junior colleges to grant baccalaureate degrees. Colleges would also need to seek additional accreditation as baccalaureate-granting institutions. Supporters argue that it would help to address shortages in workforce training and benefit students in rural areas without access to a four-year university. But critics, including some community college faculty and officials from four-year universities, counter that it would represent a dramatic shift from the traditional mission of the two-year system. They point to the state’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which designated community colleges as open-for-all campuses for career and transfer students. The four-year universities were to focus on research and higher degrees…

Cal State and UC officials said maintaining their respective roles is the best way to serve students…

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/le-me-college-degrees-20131015,0,3511251.story

Four is an enticing number:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwklMgTGfYM?feature=player_detailpage]

Little Hoover’s Report

Little (Herbert) Hoover

The state’s Little Hoover Commission issued a report yesterday on public higher ed in California. Although the Sacramento Bee mentioned on Monday that such a report would come out on Tuesday, I could find no reference to it in today’s Bee. I looked on the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle websites. (In all three, after seeing no articles, I searched their websites using such terms as “Little Hoover” without finding anything.) It’s a philosophical question whether a tree falling in a forest makes a noise if no one hears it. It’s less philosophical in this case. Maybe, just maybe, no one was impressed.

The report has the now-standard online course fixation. So no surprises there. The idea that California needs a new Master Plan is not a shocker either.

From a UC perspective, if you look at the press release from the Commission or its recommendations, there is one word that gets little attention: “research.” Did the Commission not know that only one out of ten dollars in the UC budget, primarily for core teaching, comes from the state? Did it not wonder what the other nine dollars were for? The main interest in research in the report is that it could create revenue for UC through patent royalties. Did theCommission really consider whether any of its recommendations might have repercussions on the research function? Or on hospitals run by UC?

Here is the press release from the Commission. Below that are the Commission’s ten recommendations. And below that is a link to the report.

========

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 14, 2013

For Additional Information Contact:

Stuart Drown

Executive Director

(916) 445-2125

Commission Calls for New Master Plan

In a study released today, “A New Plan for a New Economy: Reimagining Higher Education,” the Little Hoover Commission calls for a new master plan for higher education that addresses both the state’s need to substantially increase the number of graduates and the reality that state resources are limited.

Though the state was well – served by the 1960 Master Plan, substantial changes in California, together with new opportunities , warrant a rethinking of the state’s strategy for higher education, one that looks at what best serves students and the state as a whole. “

The Master Plan is dead and probably has been for a long time. California’s future depends on a new, transformative Master Plan that will be smart enough to take us through the next 50 years,” Commission Chair Jonathan Shapiro said. The Great Recession forced state government to slash spending for public higher education and for public colleges and universities to turn away California students. California is recovering, but it must change its model for higher education if it hopes to meet the needs of a growing population and provide workers with the skills to compete in the world of the 21^st century.

The Commission found that that the state lacks a strategy for achieving statewide goals for higher education. It urges California’s leaders to start the public discussion about how to change the state’s higher education system to meet the state’s current and future civic and workforce needs with the finite financial resources it has. The Commission found that online education has enormous potential to expand the reach of public higher education, if used in a manner that benefits students.

California’s colleges and universities already are using online courses, though they have yet to aggressively engage online education in ways that could help more students complete their programs on time and transfer course credits between systems. This is an area in which California higher education institutions, so long recognized as national leaders, should be setting the standard.

The Commission encourages the Legislature to provide incentives for developing online courses, particularly for high-demand and bottleneck courses, that would be awarded credit system – wide and, ideally, across all three segments.

The Little Hoover Commission is a bipartisan and independent state agency charged with recommending ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state programs. The Commission’s recommendations are submitted to the Governor and the Legislature for their consideration and action.

========

Recommendations from report:

Recommendation 1: The Governor and the Legislature should direct the development of a New Master Plan for California Higher Education. The New Master Plan should lay out goals and a public agenda for higher education aimed at the needs of students and the needs of the state as a whole to increase the number of Californians with higher education.
Recommendation 2: The Governor and the Legislature, in drafting the New Master Plan, should draw from students, alumni, civic organizations, local governments and business and economic development groups, as well as from the higher education institutions themselves.
Recommendation 3: The Governor and Legislature should encourage the drafters to think responsibly about how higher education is structured, and through the New Master Plan process, re-examine the rationale for how the three-tier system is currently organized and to explore greater campus-level specialization in all segments.
Recommendation 4: To encourage enrollment in higher education, improve higher education completion and reduce costs of remedial courses, the Legislature should provide incentives for districts and colleges to collaborate and expand counseling and outreach to middle schools and high schools in areas that have both state college campuses and community college districts.
Recommendation 5: Link a portion of funding to progress in achieving targeted goals.
Recommendation 6: The Governor and the Legislature should create an oversight body with the authority, or give the Department of Finance the authority, to obtain financial, workload and outcomes data from all institutions of California public higher education and require coordination among segments on data collection and transfer policies.
Recommendation 7: To improve transparency and public understanding of how its resources are used, the University of California should standardize its budgeting systems across campuses as well as standardize its measures for faculty workload and educational outcomes and post this data in a form that can be assessed and analyzed by the public.
Recommendation 8: The Legislature should provide incentives for developing high-demand introductory courses and bottleneck courses, such as prerequisite courses, that can be transferred for both content and unit credit to all campuses at all three segments of California’s public higher education system.
Recommendation 9: The Legislature should provide incentives for developing online courses for high-demand introductory courses, bottleneck prerequisite courses and remedial courses that demonstrate effective learning. To qualify, the course must be able to be awarded course and unit credit, at a minimum, at all California community colleges, or all California state universities, or all campuses of the University of California. Better yet would be courses that would be awarded credit at any campuses of all three segments. Courses could be designed by private or nonprofit entities according to college and university criteria.
Recommendation 10: The Legislature should develop incentives for the creation of a student-focused Internet portal that aggregates individual student records into master transcripts of classes they have taken at different institutions. The Legislature should require that sufficient privacy measures be incorporated into the portal and that California’s higher education institutions cooperate in the release of individual student data.

The full report is at http://www.lhc.ca.gov/studies/218/Report%20218.pdf.

Just Four Years? How about Eight?

Everyone wants more years!

From Inside Higher Ed today comes this story about changing the Master Plan:

Community colleges in a growing number of states are offering bachelor’s degrees. Now California and its huge two-year system may join that group. A committee created by Brice Harris, the system’s chancellor, quietly began meeting last month to mull whether the state’s 112 community colleges should be granted the authority to offer four-year degrees…

Full story at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/27/two-year-colleges-california-mull-bachelors-degrees

Four? Eight? Just more:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RosYCAUN2TA?feature=player_detailpage]