Updating California’s Master Plan for Higher Education Toward Celebrating its 50 th Anniversary

In 1959 - recognizing the anticipated arrival of the huge crop of baby boomers at university age, California adopted its legendary Master Plan for Higher Education. Its primary focus was universal 'accessibility' - to guarantee a space for every qualified student. It met that challenge, which is widely credited for laying the foundations of California’s world-leading economic growth and prosperity throughout the past 45 years.
 
A major component of the genius and success of the Master Plan was its own call for its review of itself every ten years by the California Legislature - to assure it was consistently examined and updated to help assure our continuing capacity for meeting the emerging needs of the People and State of California.
 
While its first legislative review in 1971-4 was entirely enacted into law, for various reasons, California has not reaped later benefits as the reviews, of the late1980's (but for that of the California Community Colleges) and early 2000's never got enacted into law - hence no updating effectively for more than 3 decades.

During that period our world has changed enormously, in every dimension of our lives and needs and aspirations, both as individuals and as a state, both economically and socially, including especially a profoundly expanding sense of our human dimension and capacities.  Two recent highly regarded reports confirm that our current level of educational output is not sufficient to sustain our competitive edge. 

Absent extraordinary action, the next review seems unlikely to be initiated prior to 2013. We cannot afford to wait that long.  We owe it to ourselves as well as to our students to re-examine the basics of our higher education system today with an eye toward:

• Assuring Universal Accessibility (amidst indication we've dropped far from 1st);
• Confirming Universal Affordability (to make accessibility real);
• Introducing Authentic Accountability;
• Incorporating 'Integrative Education' ('whole person learning') to make sure our students are fully prepared for productive living and working in this 21st century. 

Here is how we will tackle this enormous challenge:
 
First – we hope to amalgamate and empower the students of all California higher education segments to become a far more effective advocacy force in our higher education dialogue. 

Second – we have begun to enlist a California Higher Education Leadership Team of renowned experts to help us design and implement a smart strategic action plan to accomplish our goals.

Third – we intend to enlist from the beginning the essential internal (faculty, administrative, and governing boards) and external (leaders of business, communities of color, and California seniors) constituencies to help assure our effort gets translated into action.
 
Finally – altogether we hope to accomplish updating of California's Master Plan in time and with elegance so that we can appropriately celebrate its 50th Anniversary come 2010.
 
We invite you to join us right now in our historic effort to assure the future well-being of all the People and State of California - through this updating of California's Master Plan for Higher Education.


John Vasconcellos