Modern higher education can be said to have begun in the United States in the 1960s. Participation grew rapidly in the world’s first mass higher education system, federal grants underpinned a remarkable growth in research, and the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California established a template for system design that was to shape developments across the world.

Until the California Master Plan, excellence and access were seen as opposing goals. The Master Plan addressed them both at once, and on a grand scale. At the base of the system were community colleges offering two-year programmes in every district in the state, free of charge. Above were the campuses of the California State University, with programmes up to Masters level, though providing little research and no doctoral places. At the top were the University of California (UC) campuses, led by science giants UC Berkeley and UCLA.

California was the first ever higher education system to guarantee universal access, primarily through the community colleges. At the same time the exclusive UCs received concentrated research dollars and enrolled large number of doctoral students while also educating the top 12.5% of school leavers at first degree level. Like Singapore’s higher education today, California 1960 was at one and the same time steeply hierarchical, open and democratic – emblematic of the American approach to higher education.

For the first 25 years or so, the 1960 Master Plan succeeded in creating both high excellence and universal access. But while California fashioned the world’s strongest system of public research universities, the political and fiscal conditions supporting the Master Plan settlement evaporated. The access mission faltered first, from the 1990s onwards. The excellence mission, too, is now under growing pressure.

The University of California, facing spiralling deficits, now finds it more difficult to maintain operating costs and compete with top private universities for leading researchers. The same failure to maintain taxpayer-sourced state financing that impoverished the colleges and undermined the access mission is increasingly affecting the research universities as well. The spectacular rise and partial fall of the public higher education system in California has lessons for higher education everywhere – not least in Singapore, where the continuation of the remarkable global rise of the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University depends on a continued domestic electoral consensus about equity and public financing in Singapore’s higher education.

OUTCOMES OF THE MASTER PLAN

In terms of the excellence objective, the public research universities in the UC system were brilliantly successful. Even today, three UC campuses – UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego – are listed in the top 15 of Shanghai’s research-based Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and eight UCs are in the ARWU top 100. UC Berkeley is still the world’s leading university in the production of high citation (top 10%) papers in the physical sciences and engineering.

However, the access mission proved less successful. While the leading universities in the UC system made, and still make, a substantial contribution to equitable access, further down the chain, in the state universities and the community colleges, underfunding has fatally undermined the promise of universal opportunity so important to the 1960 Plan. According to the Master Plan, on the UC campuses upward social mobility through higher education was to be facilitated in two ways. First, with top students of all social backgrounds to choose from, the UCs could admit a high proportion of students from low income and first-generation higher education families.

This was achieved. Even today, UC Berkeley and UCLA continue to admit a large minority of their students from first generation higher education families. Second, there was meant be substantial upward transfer from community colleges to state universities and the UCs. This was less successful as an access device – most of the community college graduates who enter UC Berkeley were from middleclass dominated colleges. Transfer into the UCs from community colleges in poor districts, where there was high drop-out, was weak and became weaker.

This was partly because the community colleges themselves were allowed to deteriorate as a sector. The Master Plan rested on the willingness of state and federal taxpayers to guarantee uniformly good public schools and strong higher education. The Californian tax revolt, with Proposition 13 (1978) and after, signified a middle class that was no longer willing to include, in the common good approach to higher education, the growing number of immigrant families who had entered California from south of the border. The shift in the political environment was cemented by the 1981-89 Reagan administration’s tax reductions, cuts to public programmes and fostering of income inequality in the workplaces. For the next two decades the effects of under-funding accumulated. Then the 2008-2009 recession triggered massive reductions in state education funding that now seem very difficult to reverse.

Tuition fees are rising in community colleges, which turn away 250,000 students each year. In some years, the state colleges also turn away large numbers of qualified students. There are similar problems with state funding of public higher education in many other American states. The case of California is especially significant because whereas the state once led the country in its participation and graduation rates in higher education, it is now positioned in the bottom 10% of states on these indicators. The Master Plan era is certainly over.

THE WAY FORWARD

Where does California, and American public higher education, go from here? While the previous Obama administration proposed to abolish tuition fees to encourage enrolment in community colleges, this is unlikely to be the magic bullet. Fee abolition without a concurrent increase in state budgets, tagged to higher education, would worsen the chronic problems of state fiscal incapacity and college poverty.

A better solution would be for the federal government to support student tuition through the introduction of a national system of income contingent loans (ICL), which have been successful in both the UK and Australia. ICL are much better for access than the present American system of mortgage-style student loans, with its high default rates.

Mortgage-style student loans in the US are bad for access and equity. Graduates from poorer backgrounds find it more difficult to obtain work adequate to sustain repayments, and women earn less on average than men. This affects participation of both groups. The cost of default is carried by government. It would be better to spend public dollars on underwriting an ICL system than on funding loans companies when student debtors default.

An ICL system has minimal deterrent effect at the point of entry and minimal socio-economic bias. Students handle no money. Government-backed loans cover tuition at the point of enrolment. The loans are repaid later through income tax on a percentage of income basis. Graduates who work for low pay or leave the workforce for extended periods may not repay in full. Government funds both non-repayment and sub-commercial interest rates, so that the public subsidises equality of opportunity, not loan companies.

Subsidies can be tweaked by altering the interest rate on debt, the income threshold for repayment, and the percentage of income repaid. Government imposes a standard rate to restrain costs and, in the US, would subsidise high private sector tuition only up to the standard level.

ICL would overcome the inability of the states to fund public higher education. It would allow California to upgrade many two-year diplomas to four-year degrees, which have more bang in the labour markets, and grow the number of doctoral research universities, bringing advanced higher education to more than the present 12.5% of young people.

Meanwhile, in California, the crucial policy condition for the resurrection and realisation of the twin goals of 1960 is a new public consensus, based on longterm commitment to the common good and equal educational opportunity of all families, rich and poor. What are the implications of the California experience for Singapore? First, education systems never function well on autopilot mode, and as the circumstances change, those systems must evolve. Intelligent policy in higher education and science, which California had in the past and Singapore has in the present, can only be maintained by deliberate political will.

Californian public higher education declined because the focus of policy wavered and the underlying social, political and fiscal consensus was allowed to deteriorate. Second, government must nurture a continuing balance between inward moving migrants and local citizens, in education as in other sectors.

Potential citizen/migrant tensions take a different form in Singapore to those in California, but in each case the message is the same: getting the citizen/ migrant balance right is essential to the consensus that underpins successful higher education systems.

Simon Marginson’s book The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education (University of California Press and the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education), published in 2016, can be accessed free online at: www.doi.org/10.1525/luminos.17