Conference re-evaluates California Master Plan for Higher Education
By Meghan Hodges
Oct. 1, 2015 1:53 a.m.
Representatives from California college systems met Saturday to discuss issues surrounding the rising costs of attending higher education institutions in California.
Attendees reviewed the California Master Plan for Higher Education and reinitiated a conversation about the issues associated with higher education since the 1960s, said Iman Sylvain, external affairs vice president of the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly. Representatives from the University of California system, California State University system and California Community Colleges attended the Sacramento conference.
California’s Master Plan for Higher Education was approved at a meeting between the UC Board of Regents and the State Board of Education in 1959, in an effort to make higher education accessible and affordable for all California residents.
Sylvain said the ideas proposed during the 1959 meetings have since become outdated, leaving current and future students to struggle with the rising educational costs and decreasing diversity.
“The meeting was not so much about making decisions about what can be done to solve these problems,” said University of California Student Association President Kevin Sabo, who spoke at the conference. “Instead, we were starting a conversation to re-imagine the document, which has become disconnected over the generations.”
The original Master Plan draft stated higher education for California residents would be free. Today, students pay over $12,000 in undergraduate tuition, and professional graduate students pay an additional $17,000, Sylvain said.
Ralph Washington Jr., chair of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association, said communication across the campuses is key to making the necessary changes to the Master Plan.
“Functioning together as one organization would be most effective in making sure the collective concerns of all the campuses are represented,” Washington said.
Sylvain added she thinks this discussion will help representatives from schools begin to draft and introduce bills that will result in policy changes.
The Master Plan states the demographic representation on the California campuses should reflect that of California, Sylvain said. She added she hopes this would entail more diversity for various ethnic, racial, religious and gender groups across the school campuses.
“This program was written by elite, white males, and that’s not necessarily who attends our campuses today,” Sylvain said. “There is an underrepresentation of Chicano/a and black students, so instead of ‘reclaiming’ the Master Plan, we need to re-envision it.”
Sylvain said she thinks the first step in updating the Master Plan would be to work with representative campus student groups, unions, faculty and workers to bring new voices and ideas.
“We need to bring new voices to the table to create a space for reform, so that actual policy changes can be made,” Sylvain said. “We need people who reflect the diversity of our state, not the narrow view of those who wrote this plan in the 1960s.”
