California will need to produce more college graduates if it wants to secure a competitive economic future, according to a report released last week.
By equipping more citizens with college credentials, including associate and community college degrees, the 13-page report by California Competes states California can ensure that its job market will consist of intelligent and educated minds and remain a competitive economic state.
Currently, the state has a total GDP of $1.9 trillion, representing 13 percent of the national GDP. According to the report, California will need to produce 2.3 million post-secondary degrees and certificates by 2025 in order to maintain a strong economy.
In order to get there, the California Competes Council, made up of 13 civic and business leaders, outlines a series of recommendations for the state, which focus heavily on system and financial management. By holding both local- and state-level leaders more accountable for system management, the report states that financial woes can be alleviated.
In the report, the authors clearly state that they aimed their findings at policy makers and organizations like the Public Policy Institute of California in hopes of instigating changes within the state education system.
Hans Johnson, Bren policy fellow at the institute, said the institute has been looking at this problem for quite a while, especially because California is currently not creating pathways for more educated workers.
“There is not a shortage of knowledge about how to get more students into college and through college,” Johnson said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t improve, but there is a shortage of goal setting and planning. The problem as a state isn’t that we don’t know what works; it is that we haven’t set goals.”
In order provide more consistent and effective higher education for California residents, California Competes outlines a series of issues and recommendations for the state including ensuring that each degree received is meaningful and that a college degree becomes more meaningful rather than just symbolic to employers.
However, due to the recent budget cuts in California, Johnson said it is becoming difficult to ensure that meaningful degrees are issued because as funding is slashed, public institutions must cut enrollment in order to ensure that degrees remain of the same caliber.
“In order to preserve quality for the remaining students, we limit the number of students that we bring in,” Johnson said. “This is antithetical to our mission but it is what we do to ensure that the degree still means something.”
The UC and CSU have been faced with the problem of choosing between qualities of degrees versus quantity of degrees, which has been put to the test throughout California’s public institutions.
“We would love to educate more students, but unfortunately we don’t have the funding to do so because of the severe cuts the state has made to UC,” said UC spokesperson Shelly Meron in an email.
Despite the challenging financial environment that the university is in, four out of five incoming UC students will graduate within six years, and four years later more than one-fourth will participate in further schooling, according to the 2011 UC Accountability Report.
While the university has been able to survive during these economic times and still produce a fair number of graduates, the CSU and California Community Colleges have been immensely challenged by budget cuts.
According to the report, much of the current problem lies with the community colleges, who currently rank 49th in terms of credential completion compared with other states.
CSU spokesperson Erik Fallis said the financial problems that the state is facing are a result of the priorities of the state, which sometimes puts higher education on the back burner. In recent years, California prisons have received additional funding where public universities could face a 37 percent budget decrease if further cuts are made this year, Fallis said.
Brittany Jahn covers higher education.
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To be practical,look at the kind of work available for most California residents and how much college they require. If the number comes up showing more people can be sufficiently employed without college, then the emphasis should be placed on improving highschool , technical and trade schools. What I’m proposing is that our future does not support a state full of professors and engineers to be just clerks and tradesmen.
Does anybody truly believe there are some kids with potential to do high-tech work or engineering or something else truly productive who just can’t go to college? There aren’t. We have five million different programs to find poor kids with the slightest bit of potential and get them into top schools. There just aren’t that many of them.
Liberals lump all higher education together as if every discipline is equally important. What California Competes should do is identify which disciplines are most important and redirect resources appropriately. Does California truly need more ethnic studies students soaking up Cal Grants while paying no tuition? If the goal is to increase the number of college educated knowledge workers, how about reducing income taxes and capital gains taxes to attract them from other states?
This is idiotic.
For decades now, America in general, and California especially, have been very good at ensuring all educable people are educated to their full potential. The fact is that a college education only confers real educational benefits on those with an IQ of approximately 107 or more. People of average or below-average IQs can get college degrees, but they’re not going to really know or understand anything they wouldn’t before.
The real problem is that California’s population is becoming less intelligent, due to demographic trends. This will ultimately destroy the state.
[People of average or below-average IQs can get college degrees, but
they're not going to really know or understand anything they wouldn't
before.]
That would certainly explain the failure of a lot of these basket-weaving and racial/ethnic grievance studies majors to make it in the private sector upon graduation. We create these programs so that these marginal intellects can pretend to go to college, then wonder why there’s a huge disparity in earning income between graduates in those programs and more academically rigorous majors. The whole concept of college as an “investment” is refuted when these graduates can’t even pay back their own student loans, much less earn enough to pay state income taxes back into the California treasury…
Answer: Cut prisons, release all the peaceful drug users and self-defense-weapon possessors, other than violent felons with firearms, bring cop pay down to a reasonable level, and prioritize freedom over order.
Now we just need the legislature and governor to take this to heart. However, I bet you that Brown will push for more money for the high speed rail and prisons over education. Somehow the legal representation for prisoners is much stronger than the legal representation for students. If only our more liberal lawyers valued students like they valued criminals.
Answer: Pass the DREAM Act!
How will the Dream Act help? I am curious how it is the answer to everything that California Competes lists in the article.
The California DREAM act already passed, so I assume you mean the federal DREAM act. However, educating illegal aliens won’t help California because by definition illegal aliens cannot work in the U.S.A., and even if they find work they would be taking away jobs from American citizen.
Question: What stupid legislation will further drive the UC system into financial ruin?
California needs to lower taxes and enforce immigration laws if it wants to remain competitive. All the extra funding for universities will do no good if educated people leave the state because of the lousy business/taxation requirement while the state still provides sanctuary for hordes of illegal immigrants.
Quite voting for Libs Cal kiddies…
Bye bye High Tax Cali….take money and run….meanwhile Moonbeam yammers about more Taxes….TOTAL FAIL
California is known for more onerous taxes and regulations, and the Tax foundation shows similar trends of migration from there to other states like Texas and Arizona.
The Tax Foundation ranked the Golden State sixth highest in the nation for state and local tax burden in 2009.
Between 2000 and 2010, the most recent data available, 551,914 people left California for Texas, taking $14.3 billion in income. Texas has no state income tax or estate tax.
A total of 48,877 people moved to Texas from California between 2009 and 2010 alone, totaling $1.2 billion in income. Another 28,088 from California relocated to Nevada and 30,663 to Arizona, a loss of $699.1 million and $707.8 million in income respectively.
Overall, California had the most departures between 2009 and 2010 – 406,883 people, representing a loss of $10.6 billion in income. Over that year 365,763 people moved there, representing a net loss of 41,120 residents.
Since 2000 1.2 million more people have left California than have moved there, the second biggest net loss, after New York.
Libs continue to FAIL on Tax Policy….
LOL @ report
Mini Me Lib punks Obama and his policies:
Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Berkeley Professor and Obama supporter has an unsettling message for 2012 college graduates: “You’re screwed.”
The blistering verdict came as part Mr. Reich’s Sunday column addressed to “Members of the Class of 2012″ wherein the former Labor secretary decries the current state of jobs and opportunities for recent college graduates entering the Failed Obama economy:
As a former secretary of labor and current professor, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.
You’re screwed.
First, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time finding a job in the Obama economy. The job market you’re heading into is still bad. Fewer than half of the graduates from last year’s class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking.
That’s been the pattern over the last three graduating classes ever since Obama was elected: It’s been taking graduates more than a year to land the first job. And those who still haven’t found a job will be competing with you, making your job search even harder.
Contrast this with the Bush class of 2008, whose members were lucky enough to get out of here and into the job market before the Great Recession really hit. Almost three-quarters of them found jobs within the year.
Last year’s young college graduates lucky enough to land jobs had an average hourly wage of only $16.81, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about $35,000 a year – lower than the yearly earnings of young college graduates in 2007, before the Recession. The typical wage of young college graduates dropped 4.6 percent between 2007 and 2011, adjusted for inflation.
Yup, even hard core LibTard Reich calls out Obama as a failure. If you want to get a good job you must oust Obama and his economic illiterate Lib cabal in Washington.