California Colleges Held Prisoner

With little notice, a catastrophe is consuming California’s higher education system.

In their zeal to construct the world’s largest prison system, California policy makers have abandoned the state’s historic commitment to public colleges and universities. Instead, they are erecting a string of human warehouses designed primarily to confine the state’s growing economically disenfranchised and marginalized populations.

Absent a major reversal, these policies will eventually shrink state support for higher education - and diminish California’s future economic viability.

In the 132 years prior to 1984, California built 12 prisons and 28 universities; since 1984 21 new prisons and one university. In 1984, public colleges and universities accounted for 14 percent of the state budget, while the Department of Corrections consumed just 3 percent of the state budget.

According to a recent projection by the independent Rand Corp., by 2006 the Correctons budget will account for 18 percent of the state budget while spending on higher education evaporates.

Dramatic growth of the prison industry results from the unchallenged rise of the California Correctional peace Officers Associaiton. Now the most formidable political force in the state, the associaiton and its allies smear and silence opponents by calling them criminal sympathizers.

The state’s growing student population will require an additional 20 new campuses in the next decade. Yet when the University of California Regents announced the site for their proposed 10th campus in Merced County in 1995, they declared that the $600 million to construct the campus would not be available for at least 10 years, if ever.

Patrick M. Callen, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, sums up the crisis: “It isn’t that this state has a bad plan for accommodating the increase in studetn enrollment. It has no plan at all.”

California’s public colleges and universities also suffer from a deteriorating infrastructore. Just to maintain the current infrastructure and prepare for future increased enrollment, higher education will need an additional billion dollars annually over the next 10 years.

This will put higher education in direct competition with the more than $2 billion yearly additional that Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed for prisons since 1994.

In its 1995 report “The Challenge of the Century,” the California Postsecondary Education Commission noted that higher education “supplies an educated citizenry, a flexible and versatile work force, a strong and dynamic economy, and cultural values that nurture social and political cohesion among a diverse populace.”

Along with fewer classrooms, requests for financial aid has ore than doubled, while available funds have withered. As a result, student borrowing and resulting debt burdens are causing many to reconsider educational aspirations.

All this is occurring as the world continues its rapid pace toward a post-industrial, information-based economy where a well-educated work force is essential. If California is to meet the challenges of the next century, the state must reduce the size of its prison system and expnad the educational opportunities that will nurture its future work force.

xxxx