California lawmakers find it a lot easier to explain the problems they face in preserving access to the state’s public colleges than to develop a long-term strategy to fix them.
In the shorter term, they’re betting on two events—neither of them particularly sure things—to avert more cuts.
The bigger event is the November 6 statewide referendum on Proposition 30, Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown’s proposal to temporarily raise the sales tax by a quarter of a cent and raise income taxes on wealthy residents. The new taxes are designed to fill what would otherwise be an $8-billion hole in the state’s budget. If Prop 30 fails, under the terms of the 2013 budget, the state will automatically cut $338-million from community colleges, $375-million from the University of California system, and $250-million from the California State University system. Public schools would be hit with even bigger cuts.
It’s “a watershed moment,” says Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat and chair of the California Senate Education Committee.
That is not the only issue of financial significance. Mid-November is also when founders and employees of Facebook, along with company insiders, will have the first chance to cash in their stock options, following Facebook’s May 17 initial public offering. The governor and legislators have built their budget on the assumption that the state could collect a $1.4-billion windfall in capital-gains taxes from all that option activity.
But Facebook has been trading well below its IPO price, which could prompt many of those stockholders to hang on for a while longer, forcing the state to seek additional cuts to make up for that lost income.
Edmund G. (Pat) Brown was governor when the California Master Plan for Higher Education was enacted in 1960. The current Governor Brown, a Democrat, is his son. Jerry Brown hasn’t been the same kind of champion for higher education as his father was, although as Marty Block, the Democratic chair of the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee, also a Democrat, is quick to note, “he certainly doesn’t have the resources his father had.”
Pat Brown’s California was still a booming state, a magnet for business and opportunity, thanks in part to one of the best, most expansive, and most affordable state higher-education systems in the country.
Mr. Lowenthal, a former professor at California State University at Long Beach, says he too longs for the days when the quality and affordability of California’s public colleges helped make the state “the West Coast version of Ellis Island.”
In their Sacramento offices, just steps from the gold-domed Capitol building—itself a symbol of the state government’s munificent past—Mr. Lowenthal and Mr. Block describe a higher-education vision that is far more prosaic. They say the key today is to ensure that the degrees the colleges and universities offer are in sync with the needs of the state’s economy and its social needs. Colleges themselves must find ways to operate more economically and efficiently so students can enroll, transfer if need be, and graduate in a timely and cost-effective way.
“We don’t have unlimited resources,” Mr. Lowenthal says. “That paradigm is gone.”
In fact, California has no shortage of advocates for finding new sources of state revenue to augment the traditional sources now under stress. One of them, Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association, says the state could be collecting a lot more in revenues if it would broaden its tax base, close loopholes on corporate taxes, and exact a severance tax on its offshore oil. The ideas are controversial, but he says a complex state, with complex needs, shouldn’t flinch from its challenges. After all, Mr. Goldberg says, “We’re the only state with our own dream. There’s no New Jersey dream.”
But the political climate has put that kind of approach—indeed just about any political discussion where the result means higher taxes—largely off the table. “Two things are clear when we poll my constituents,” says Mr. Block, who represents a district near San Diego. “They don’t want any more cuts, and they don’t want to pay more taxes.”
