The California Legislative Analyst has called for guaranteed access for California students to their local California State University campus. This is in response to the increases in campuses declaring themselves impacted, which allows them to ignore local access priority and then pick the best qualified students from anywhere in the state. Setting aside the meritocracy issues, the CLA report says, "We believe that ensuring local access to all eligible students is more important than maintaining equal admissions criteria for all applicants."
One must keep in mind that admissions are a less-than-zero-sum game in this system, where budget cuts and space limitations have left the system unable to accept all qualified students.
On the other hand, the system Chancellor of the CSU, Charles Reed, has stated that given the impact of budget cuts, "We can no longer justify offering practically every major at every campus . . ." The targets for program cuts would be based on lower enrollment programs. With state funding cuts for next year predicted to be on the order of eighteen percent, one wonders what the definition of "lower enrollment" might become.
What happens when both plans come together? If a prospective student lives near a campus where the program they are interested in is cut, but outside the region of the campus where the program survived, should they change career aspirations? Should we put out maps of regions of the state where physics or geology are still studied for parents to move to for the benefit of their children who want to study in those areas? It should be interesting to see how this works out.
T.S. Hall
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Another bad idea. I understand trying to make a CSU education accessible to people locally, it sounds like a good idea. However, the CSU may be forced to take people who just can't benefit as much as someone else who may be much more capable. This will only make the "Gainful Employment" policy that is being discussed more of a problem.
ReplyDeleteCutting majors may or may not be a bad idea. Sometimes money is spread to thin and we just end up with lots of mediocre programs churning out mediocre students. It might be better to have a few well funded programs with up to date facilities. However, I don't such a tradeoff is going to occur, we might just go from lots of poorly funded majors, to a few poorly funded majors.
However, your last paragraph definitely highlights the worst problems with these ideas. Students could end up a lot worse off.