The CSU Crisis and California's Future: A Note on the Series
The CSU Crisis and California’s Future: A Note on the Series
This series of reports analyzes the impact of the fiscal cutbacks on opportunity for higher education in the California State University system from a variety of perspectives. The huge network of 23 universities serves the largest number of BA level students in the state. The CSU has a much larger undergraduate student body than the UC system and educates many more Latino and African American students. Many CSU students are first-generation college students struggling to get an education in difficult times. Among Latinos and African Americans, most are the first in their family to get a degree.
The studies were commissioned under the direction of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP) at UCLA. Though the CRP is a research center at UCLA and the UC system has its own severe challenges, we acknowledge that the CSU system is the linchpin in providing equitable access to higher education in this state. California is in the midst of a full-blown crisis of college access and completion, and this crisis threatens the future of the state and its communities. The California economy is projected to decline if more students do not complete BA degrees.
Current budget cuts are only the latest chapter in a long pattern of underfunding higher education in the state. Over the last 20 years, state contributions to the CSU have declined by 43.6%, while student fees have increased 103%. These studies address only one sector of society—higher education. But they arise from an awareness that the only secure way into the middle class is through the college door. Our goal is to help policy makers and the voting public to consider the depth and danger of the cuts, their long-term impacts, and what may be done to preserve the promise of a vital future for California and its State University system.
The series was produced with very low budgets and involved considerable contribution of effort by the authors and editors. The basic idea was to produce a series of reports analyzing available data, or data that could be collected for a low cost, and try to present a number of independent assessments of impacts on various aspects of this large system. We followed our customary procedure of issuing a call for research on a variety of important questions, soliciting proposals from interested scholars, sending the research proposals to outside experts in the field for review, and then commissioning authors to prepare reports. The draft reports were discussed at a roundtable on the UCLA campus, which led to suggestions for editing.
The research costs were shouldered by the California Faculty Association, the Ford Foundation, and the Civil Rights Project. Though the Faculty Association has a very strong interest in a number of these issues, the Association had no role in commissioning or evaluating the studies. They respected the traditional scholarly process we require from all funders of Civil Rights Project research. We grant all interested instructors or other groups the right to reproduce these reports without any payment of royalties or permissions, so long as authorship is appropriately credited. Authors have final control of their own manuscripts and the opinions expressed in them are the conclusions of those authors.
For a brief summary of each paper or to download a copy of the complete manuscript, please read The CSU Crisis and California's Future: Abstracts and Authors.
