A few days ago, the Senate Education Committee approved a bill that would allow some community colleges to award bachelor’s degrees on a pilot basis on the assertion that the four-year systems have been unable to meet demand. It was noted that 20 other states already grant that authority to community colleges.
“We’re in a different time now. California is in a better position now to invest in closing our skills gap,” the author of the bill, Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, said of his third attempt to make the change. “It’s wishful thinking to believe we can meet the challenge of producing another 60,000 bachelor degrees a year without using community colleges, and the longer we delay in using them, the further behind we will fall.”
These and other events indicate that while the master plan may have once served California well, that time has passed and we can no longer afford assumptions that have little relevance to 21st-century reality.
It’s high time, 53 years after the plan’s adoption, that it be seriously revisited. The reconsideration should include weighing the merger of three systems into one, as many other states have done.
The master plan was a hallmark achievement of Gov. Pat Brown, and his son could perform no more important work than making it relevant again.
http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/05/6376384/dan-walters-its-time-to-revisit.html