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The Hechlinger Report
Is California saving higher education?
Spending money to find solutions to some of higher ed’s biggest problems
By Jon Marcus and Felicia Mello
December 3, 2019
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jaelyn Deas and her four best friends shared
everything, including late-night study sessions in the library at San
Jose State University and a never-ending preoccupation with how they’d
pay for their tuition there.
The one thing they didn’t do together? Graduate.
While she was juggling a major in international business, a minor in
Japanese and a job to help keep up with her expenses, Deas fell behind,
and her friends put on their caps and gowns and walked across the stage
in May without her.
It was they who were defying the odds. Fewer than 20 percent of her
classmates who entered San Jose State in 2014 finished in four years —
less than half the national average.
That didn’t make Deas feel any better. She considered quitting, or
transferring to a community college. Then she was summoned to the
financial aid office, where she learned that the university, part of
the California State University System, was giving her a grant of up to
$1,500 to help her get across the finish line.
“I walked out of the office crying. I had no idea something like this
existed, and it took a burden off my shoulders,” said Deas, who is on
track now to earn her bachelor’s degree before the year is out.
It’s one example of the many ways that California is taking on
seemingly intractable problems that are plaguing higher education
nationwide.
These include the longer-than-expected amount of time it takes students
to graduate; high dropout rates; financial aid that doesn’t cover
living expenses; courses that cost more than students will earn from
what they learn; institutions that prey on veterans and others;
financial aid applications so complex that many students never bother
with them; admissions policies that favor relatives of donors and
alumni; credits that won’t transfer; pricey textbooks; and “remedial”
education requirements that force students to retake subjects they
should have learned in high school, often frustrating them enough to
quit.
Not all of the initiatives to solve these problems have succeeded. Nor
is California the only state that’s trying them, often in the absence
of reforms at the federal level. That program at San Jose State to help
students make it to graduation by offering them small bursts of
financial aid, for instance, was pioneered at Georgia State University.
Related: Colleges are using big data to track students in an effort to boost graduation rates, but it comes at a cost
But California, with a higher education budget for 2019-2020 of $18.5
billion, is bucking a national trend — most other states are continuing
to reduce, not increase, their higher education budgets. Among other
initiatives this year, the state has invested heavily in helping
community college students transfer into four-year programs, spent more
than $50 million on food banks and other programs to combat student
hunger and homelessness, opened an online community college to serve
people who are already working and boosted state grants for students
with children.
Meanwhile, all but four states are spending less on higher education,
per student, than they did in 2008, according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, a liberal-learning think thank. Those spending
more? Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming — and California.
Some of what is happening here is inspiring similar reforms around the
country. After California took on the NCAA in September by requiring
that college athletes be allowed to sign paid endorsement deals, for
example, legislators in New York, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and South Carolina started mulling comparable legislation.
That prompted a decision by the NCAA to let college athletes benefit
from the use of their names and likenesses, though the association is
still working out the details.
Fueling the reforms and the funding behind them are a projected
shortage of workers with the necessary degrees to fill the jobs of the
future, a public backlash in response to budget cuts made during the
recession and a concern that the state had been abandoning its long
tradition of high-quality, low-cost education.
Californians remember “when younger generations could truly expect to
live a better life than their parents and grandparents. And that dream
has been fading,” said David Chiu, a member of the State Assembly from
San Francisco who is active in education issues.
“That’s why so many of us have been focused on how do we bring this
back,” Chiu said. “Because we had that history, because we knew what a
well-functioning higher education system could do, we aspire to that
again.”
Over the course of a century, California built the country’s top-ranked
public research university and its largest and most affordable
community college system. Today there are 10 University of California
campuses, 23 Cal State (or CSU) campuses and 115 community colleges.
A California resident in 1960 could earn a bachelor’s degree at the
world-class University of California, or UC, for just $60 per semester
in “incidental fees” — about $500 in today’s currency. That same year,
the state adopted a master plan for higher education: The UC would
serve the top eighth of graduating high school seniors while the top
third would be eligible to attend a CSU campus, and the community
colleges would be open to all.
The goal, writes historian John Aubrey Douglass, was “broad access
combined with the development of high quality, mission differentiated,
and affordable higher education institutions.”
But in the coming decades, politicians of both parties would respond to
economic downturns by cutting higher education funding, causing tuition
to rise. The trend peaked during the recession that began in 2008, when
UC hiked undergraduate tuition by nearly a third in a single year.
The price of undergraduate tuition and fees, when adjusted for
inflation, has increased sixfold in the last 40 years at the University
of California and is 15 times higher at California State campuses,
according to the independent California Budget and Policy Center.
Only one student in 10 graduates in four years at Cal State Los
Angeles, and fewer than one in five at nine of the system’s other
campuses.
In a poll of likely voters by the Public Policy Institute of
California, 53 percent said the higher education system was going in
the wrong direction, and 56 percent that an education was growing less
affordable.
The upshot? Like many states, California is behind in its progress
toward a goal of increasing the proportion of adults with a college or
university credential, according to the Lumina Foundation, which tracks
this; today, fewer than half of its adults have one, short of the
target of 60 percent by 2030 set the Campaign for College Opportunity,
an advocacy group. (Lumina is among the many funders of The Hechinger
Report, which co-produced this story.)
“That number gets a lot of play across the street,” said Jake Jackson,
a Sacramento-based research fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy
Institute of California, or PPIC, gesturing toward the state Capitol.
At the same time, California’s student population has changed in ways
that foreshadow national trends, becoming more ethnically diverse, with
growing numbers coming from low-income families in which they are the
first to go to college. No racial or ethnic group constitutes a
majority here; 39 percent of residents are Hispanic, 38 percent are
white, 14 percent are Asian and 6 percent are black. More than a
quarter are immigrants.
Those demographics have allowed for experimentation with ways to
encourage college-going by people from a variety of backgrounds.
Doing this isn’t easy, even here. Cristina Mora remembers feeling lost
and adrift after leaving her close-knit Latino neighborhood in Los
Angeles to enroll at UC Berkeley in 1999, “like there had been a
clerical error, and I’d been admitted by mistake.” She didn’t take
advantage of a professor’s office hours until her junior year, finally
converting the Cs and Ds she’d been earning into A-pluses.
Today, Mora is an associate professor of sociology at Berkeley and a
mentor to other first-generation college students. She says UC has made
strides in attracting diverse applicants by increasing recruiting in
previously ignored areas such as the Central Valley and towns along the
Mexican border and making it easier for community college students to
transfer. Students of her generation returned to their communities, she
said, bringing with them “a sense that the UC system provides an
opportunity, and that these are places that would be welcoming.”
But black and Latino students today still are less likely than their
peers to graduate from UC or CSU institutions in four years and are
underrepresented on the state’s most selective campuses. Among UC
students, they take on higher-than-average levels of debt.
“We have a long history of not catering to these populations,” Mora said.
If policymakers are going to close California’s graduation gap, they’ll
have to figure out how to meet the needs of students like Mora and
Deas. And if California can do that, perhaps the rest of the country
can, too.
Some of what is happening in California leverages the state’s vast
power of the purse. That’s one way it’s trying to increase the number
of transfer students, for example — especially from its community
colleges — accepted by both public and private universities.
Then-Gov. Jerry Brown threatened in 2017 both to withhold a $50 million
allocation to the UC system unless it increased its share of transfer
students and to strip private colleges and universities of their
eligibility for the $2 billion Cal Grant program unless they did a
better job admitting transfers.
Brown wanted some public universities with low numbers of transfers to
take one transfer student for every two freshmen, a goal they’ve
largely met. In addition, the private, nonprofit member institutions of
the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities
have agreed to collectively enroll 3,000 transfer students annually by
next year.
The state invested $75 million last year to try to raise those low CSU
graduation rates and plans to spend another $75 million this year. The
rates have already slowly started to improve, with 27.7 percent of CSU
students now finishing in four years, up from 19 percent in 2015. (The
most recent available national average is 42 percent, the U.S.
Department of Education says.)
Some of that extra money has gone toward adding sections of courses
that were filling up too fast. Not getting into the classes he needs is
a big fear for student James Soberano, a San Jose State freshman
majoring in computer engineering who was pecking away at his laptop in
the student center.
“I definitely want to be out of here in four years,” Soberano said. “If not, I’ll be taking summer classes to be sure I am.”
San Jose State has also added 30 new advisers in the last three years,
a university spokeswoman said. Data analysis is being used to pinpoint
bottlenecks, such as those overcrowded courses. The “Spartan Completion
Grant” that Deas got is part of a program that began last year for
seniors who are within two semesters of earning their degrees and meet
other requirements. They can receive up to $1,500 per semester. The
university says that 70 percent of recipients have graduated.
Related: Questioning their fairness, a record number of colleges stop requiring the SAT and ACT
Another effective way of speeding students toward degrees is by
eliminating noncredit remedial courses, which require them to repeat
subjects such as algebra and English. More than four in 10 college
students across the country end up in remedial — also called
“developmental” — classes. That costs students $1.3 billion a year,
according to the Center for American Progress, and many simply give up.
In California, 80 percent of community college students were being sent
to remedial courses in English or math, and only 16 percent of them
earned a certificate or associate degree within six years, according to
the PPIC.
In response, in 2017, California’s community colleges began putting
less-well-prepared students into credit-bearing introductory courses
with extra tutoring. The CSU system, too, started doing this last year,
and now also funnels students with low high school grades or
standardized test scores into special preparation programs in the
summer before their freshman years.
Though some faculty members have objected to the changes, early studies
suggest they’ve led to big improvements: 63 percent of community
college students who went directly into transfer-level English
composition courses with tutoring successfully completed them, compared
to 32 percent who went to remediation.
Bright murals decorate the walls of UC Berkeley’s Basic Needs Center,
framing the entrance to a food pantry laden with organic mac and
cheese, fresh produce and bread from a nearby bakery.
Students who have trouble affording food and rent come here to do their
grocery shopping, sign up for public benefits or meet with counselors.
A community kitchen is under construction, and volunteers use a bicycle
with a custom trailer to pedal around nearby neighborhoods collecting
excess produce from residents’ gardens.
The center is the result of student activism spotlighting the
nontuition costs of college in a state where the price of housing has
reached staggering heights. The goal: to ease students’ stress about
food and shelter so they can focus on their studies.
Researchers have documented widespread food and housing insecurity
among students across the country, and the purchasing power of the
federal Pell Grant, which can help cover living costs, is at a historic
low. California students spend an average of $2,020 a month, or $18,180
per nine-month academic year, on food, housing, books, supplies and
transportation, a survey released in September by the California
Student Aid Commission, or CSAC, found.
California is well equipped to address college affordability because,
unlike in many other states, every low-income student who has completed
high school within the previous year and meets academic requirements is
entitled to a state scholarship, the Cal Grant, that helps pay his or
her tuition.
While hundreds of thousands of students still miss out on the grants
each year because they took time off before college, this tradition of
comparatively generous tuition assistance has nevertheless freed
policymakers to think about how to make the other aspects of college
more affordable, said Lande Ajose, senior policy advisor on higher
education to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“For six of the last seven years, tuition has remained flat at our
colleges, and yet we find the cost of college increasing, and that is
because the cost of living is increasing,” Ajose said.
The California Assembly passed a bill this year that would have made it
easier for all students with financial need to access Cal Grants and
tied the amount to their full cost of attendance. Though the Senate
left the measure stranded in its Education Committee because of
concerns about the price, its authors, the governor’s office and higher
education advocates say that they are discussing how to move forward on
another version in the next session.
Given California’s size and diversity, Ajose said she hopes the
solution they come up with can serve as a model for the rest of the
country.
“Just as California’s student population is becoming more diverse,
that’s not the time to disinvest in higher education,” she said.
“That’s the time to double down on investment in higher education, if
we really care about equity.”
California has thrown a lot of other ideas at making college more affordable.
The California State system and some UC campuses have substituted
cheaper digital books and open-source materials for textbooks, for
example, which the CSAC found cost California students $1,080 a year.
The CSAC itself last year began to address the complex process of
applying for financial aid, which research shows makes prospective
students less likely to enroll in college in the first place, by
creating a more user-friendly website and making it easier to compare
the costs of different schools.
In a pilot program by the California Policy Lab, redesigning and
simplifying letters sent to 130,000 high school students about Cal
Grants made them 9 percent more likely to register for the online Cal
Grant system by June of their senior years. “That’s a lot of new
students able to attend college and improve their career options,” said
the lab’s executive director, Evan White.
Many campuses are opening food pantries like the one at UC Berkeley,
holding outreach fairs to sign up students for the state’s version of
the federal food stamp program or starting emergency housing programs —
all backed by that more than $50 million in this year’s state budget to
help deal with student hunger and homelessness.
Those funds came after students packed legislative hearings over the
past two years to testify about rising rents and having to work 30
hours a week on top of their study time. That kind of activism also
stands out from what is happening in most other states, where students
lack strong statewide organizations or are less involved in state
politics, said Max Lubin, an Education Department official in the Obama
administration who started the advocacy group Rise while a graduate
student at Berkeley. The group provides paid fellowships for students
to spend a semester lobbying politicians on college costs.
“California higher education leaders have learned in the last couple of
years that they can get a lot more done by working with students than
in conflict with them,” Lubin said.
The state is trying to help older students, too, a challenge also
facing the rest of the country. More than 35 million Americans over age
25 have some college credits but never got degrees, the Census Bureau
says; 29 percent of undergraduate and 76 percent of graduate
students are 25 or older, the U.S. Department of Education reports. But
many juggle families and jobs, and aren’t eligible for state financial
aid.
This year, Gov. Newsom successfully pushed to provide students at
public universities and colleges who are parents of dependent children
with as much as $6,000 a year for books, childcare and other nontuition
expenses on top of tuition aid. An estimated 29,000 parents qualify,
the governor’s office says. In September, the state debuted an online
community college designed especially for people 25 to 34 who are
already working but don’t have a college degree or certificate.
Legislators also filed several bills to tighten regulation of
for-profit colleges and universities, which often serve older,
low-income students. One would have required these schools to prove
that the educations for which they were charging graduates resulted in
jobs that paid enough to justify the cost — similar to the Obama-era
“gainful employment” rule that has been blocked at the federal level by
the Trump administration — or lose their access to state financial aid.
Related: Colleges provide misleading information about their costs
That proposal, which was introduced by Chiu, was beaten back by
industry lobbying, but, in a compromise, the state will begin to
collect information on graduates’ income and debt, by institution, so
that consumers can make better-informed choices about which programs
will and will not pay off.
“We’ll have a pretty good sense of how many schools are failing our
students and exactly who they are. We can then decide what the
consequences of that should be,” Chiu said.
Several other measures to crack down on for-profit schools stalled,
thanks in part to the for-profit colleges’ aggressive lobbying
campaign. But advocates say they were only the first salvos in an
ongoing battle.
“In large part it’s because of the federal retreat on oversight of
for-profit colleges that California lawmakers are seeing a need to
elevate the state’s attention” to it, said Bob Shireman, a senior
fellow at The Century Foundation who served in the Clinton and Obama
administrations.
With the entire structure of for-profit college oversight in California
up for renewal next year, said Shireman, he expects that some of these
proposals will be raised again. That will continue to put the state in
direct opposition to the Trump administration on higher education
regulation, as it is on many other issues.
Few clashes are as pitched as the fight over who gets to decide whether
veterans in California can use their GI Bill benefits to attend
for-profit Ashford University, which the state’s attorney general has
accused in an ongoing lawsuit of misleading students, including
veterans.
That tug of war began when the state stepped in to block veterans who
enrolled at Ashford from receiving taxpayer-funded support. In
response, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in September stripped
authority from the state veterans education agency to determine
veterans’ benefits eligibility there.
California is not the only state trying to improve the success rates of
its students, or to make policy in the absence of federal action; amid
the partisan bickering in Washington, the Higher Education Act, which
covers all federal regulations over higher education and which Congress
typically reauthorizes every four to six years, hasn’t been updated
since 2008.
Louisiana last year started to require high school seniors to complete
the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Texas will also require
this, beginning in 2021-22. Currently, 30 percent of undergraduates or
aspiring undergraduates never fill out this form, forgoing the chance
to receive financial aid; a third of them would have qualified for a
federal Pell Grant, research supported by the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences found.
Colorado is dropping remedial courses beginning in 2022, and
universities and colleges there have already started getting rid of
them.
Many states have resorted to enforcement actions, lawsuits and new laws
to crack down on for-profit colleges and universities and
loan-servicing companies they say cheat or mislead students.
And at the federal level, a House bill — introduced by U.S. Rep. Adam
Schiff of California — would create a pilot program to help community
colleges pay for free meals for students who can’t afford to buy food.
But few other states are trying as many reforms at once as California,
or can do so at such scale; its financial aid program is the nation’s
biggest, and its community colleges alone have a collective enrollment
of 2.1 million.
California still has to figure out how to cope with the challenges that
come with that scale. Each year, tens of thousands of qualified
applicants are turned away from UC and CSU campuses due to lack of
space.
But California’s size will also continue to make it a laboratory for
innovation, Kevin Cook, associate director of the PPIC Higher Education
Center, said.
“There’s a lot of interest from large funders,” he said. “Because of
the size of the state, if you can make something work here, it will
probably work anywhere else.”
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