As Clark Kerr’s friends and colleagues sift through their
memories of him, many remember his dream of universal access to
higher education.
Kerr was a major force behind the Master Plan for Higher
Education, which dramatically increased Californians’ access
to college, and that dream of access may be in jeopardy as
California faces its current fiscal crisis.
“His visionary thinking about this state’s education
… made California the envy of not only other states, but of other
nations,” said Henry Yang, chancellor of UC Santa Barbara, in
a statement.
The Master Plan, which was adopted in 1960, aimed to provide
access to all eligible students at a time when the Baby Boomer
generation had begun to inundate the university.
In the late 1950s, as legislators scrambled to build
universities in their districts to meet the burgeoning demand, Kerr
proposed a three-tiered system which combined “selective
admissions and open admissions” in one system that provided
for orderly growth of the university, said Marian Gade, a research
associate for the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC
Berkeley who worked with Kerr for 35 years.
The plan made the University of California the primary research
institution, the only part of the system with the authority to
award doctoral degrees and the most selective, admitting the top
eighth of graduating high school students.
The California State Universities were designated to focus on
education from undergraduate through master’s degrees, were
allowed to give doctorates in conjunction with UCs in certain
fields and were obliged to admit the top third of high school
graduates.
Community colleges would take anyone who wanted to continue
their education.
When the Master Plan was adopted, the state agreed that if the
system of higher education became more efficient, the state would
“provide funding to make sure that all students had a
place,” said Todd Greenspan, coordinator for educational
relations at the UC Office of the President.
However, as California faces a fiscal crisis, the legislature
said this year ““ for the first time ““ it may not fund
new enrollment growth in the UC or the CSU.
This means that the systems must find some way to admit the top
eighth and third of eligible high school students, respectively, to
keep their commitment to the Master Plan, or risk turning students
away.
The UC Board of Regents have maintained their commitment to the
Master Plan’s accessibility promises, but have yet to approve
a plan to deal with the dire financial problems facing the UC.
“It would be very ironic that that part of the Master Plan
would be voided at the very time that Clark Kerr passes away,
because that was one of the great things that he did,”
Greenspan said.
Kerr’s plan made the higher educational system more open
and made it easier to transfer from a community college to a UC or
a CSU.
Gade said the possibility of transferring “is what makes
(the university) both excellent and egalitarian.”
“(Kerr) had a profound effect on creating the finest
public higher education in the world,” said Tom Nussbaum,
chancellor of the California Community College system.
The Master Plan has been immensely successful, with enrollments
in California higher educational institutions increasing eight-fold
since 1960, according to a briefing compiled by UCOP.
As an economist, Kerr recognized that higher education could
still be vulnerable to economic cycles.
“He advocated for a financial plan in the late 1990s to
keep us out of these cycles of boom and bust,” Gade said,
adding that a financial master plan was never approved.
Kerr originally advocated the state’s paying of
instructional fees for higher education to ensure access to people
of all economic backgrounds. When it became clear that it would be
necessary for students to pay tuition and fees, he supported
moderate fees and a system of financial aid that became the Cal
Grant program.
“He said (the university) would accommodate eligible
students … basically an entitlement to education,”
Greenspan said.