In essence, the California Master Plan was a promise to college-bound high-school graduates, with appropriate grades, that they would be able to attend a public college. That required, however, adequate state funding. According to the authors, what politically happens in California in the late 1970s and in the 1980s that significantly weakens the California Master Plan's ability to survive?

Based on the article below, please explain the questions above, thank you.

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher EducationBy Aaron Brady and Mike Konczal with Dissent Magazine

The Master Plan was meant to sort all college-bound high school graduates into three streams and to make it possible for a student to move from the bottom tier to the top. The doors of the University of California were thrown open, tuition-free, for the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates. The top 33.3 percent could find a place in one of the California State Universities, which were also tuition-free. Everyone else, if they so chose, could go to one of the many California Community Colleges, which were open not only to high school graduates but also to qualifying non-traditional students. Perhaps most important, community college graduates had the opportunity to transfer to one of the UCs or CSUs to finish their bachelor's degree, if their grades were above a certain point. In theory and to a significant extent in practice, anyone from anywhere in California could, if they worked hard enough, get a bachelor's degree from one of the best universities in the country (and, therefore, in the world), almost free of charge. The unthinkable without institutions of mass higher education, like this one, provided at public expense.

The first thing to change was the price tag. Within living memory, all public universities in California were nominally free (fees were assessed, but were comparatively quite low). Today, California colleges and universities are comparably priced to their private competitors. Reagan began the process of privatization in 1969, convincing the state to relax its restrictions on the level of fees that could be assessed. By 2011, when UC officially switched from a system of fees to an explicitly tuition-centric model, it was simply admitting what had long been obvious; so-called "fees" were already high enough to constitute a tuition system. And as UC Faculty Association president Bob Meister pointed out in a widely circulated 2009 online open letter, "They Pledged Your Tuition," the UC finances its many construction bonds by pledging the revenues it collects and plans to collect from tuition as collateral, effectively using its power to raise tuition indefinitely as a surety for its debts (of which it has many), and thereby ensuring that it will.

When we talk about the decline of public higher education systems such as California's, however, rising tuition is only part of the story, and maybe not the most important part.

Along with pushing instructional costs onto students, for example, the state of California has made it easier for state universities to balance their budgets by accepting more out- of-state students (and thus, fewer and fewer Californian students). Out-of-state students pay much higher tuition rates, but under the Master Plan, state funding was contingent on enrolling a minimum number of in-state students. As the state has withdrawn its commitment to fully fund its universities, it has progressively detached what funding remains from these kinds of commitments. Governor Jerry Brown may have put the final nail in the coffin when, in June, he vetoed specific enrollment targets for the UC from the annual budget. Moreover, since 2007, the extra $20,000 in tuition money that out-of- state students' pay has gone directly to the schools enrolling these studentsrather than reverting to the UC as a wholeperversely incentivizing each campus to take on fewer California students.

This gradual retreat from enrollment quotas only adds to a problem that has plagued the California system since its inception: too many applicants and too little space. Over the last three decades, the state has given up on increasing the total institutional capacity the classrooms, dorms, and new campusesthat a continuously growing university-age population requires. This shortfall is not as immediately visible as red lines in planning documents, as politically explosive as enrollment targets, or as sharply felt by stretched family budgets. But the fact that the state has stopped keeping up with the demand for higher education points to a slow but fundamental structural change underway in higher education as a whole.

Public colleges and universities have historically absorbed the bulk of this country's college-educated populationperhaps three-quarters of the totalbut it was only a massive postwar expansion of affordable public education that made a bachelor's degree so broadly attainable in the United States, such that a college degree could come to seem more or less a prerequisite for a middle-class life. Private universities absorb a relatively small percentage of the total demand for higher education in the United Statesa percentage that has remained steady over the course of decades, even centuries. It is only because and to the extent that they built new colleges and universities that states like California were able to outpace population growth and increase the percentage of their citizens with advanced degrees. In the decades after the Second World War, the state of California built new facilities, campuses, and even entire universities at precisely the speed judged necessary to keep pace with student demand.

Today, the University of California is an eleven-campus system, but as late as the 1950s it had two campuses, in Berkeley and Los Angeles. Only as the movement to rationalize and revamp the system gathered steam in the late fifties did the university reach something like its present size and shape, with the establishment of six more general campuses in a single period of furious growth. In 1958, Santa Barbara College was upgraded to full university status and chartered as the UC Santa Barbara. In 1959, the UC Citrus Experiment Station was expanded to form the new UC Riverside campus, and the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture was converted into what is now the UC Davis general campus. In 1960 the Scripps Institute of Oceanography gave birth

to the UC San Diego. And in 1965 the UC Irvine and the UC Santa Cruz were built out of nothing at all. Each of these universities was a world-class institution almost out of the gate, making it possible for one-eighth of California's high school graduates to receive a world-class education. Something like the same expansion occurred in the California Community College and California State systems during this period. Between 1957 and 1965, California established eight new CSUsout of an eventual twenty- fourwhile more than half its present complement of 112 community colleges was built in the period between 1957 and 1978.

California essentially stopped building new colleges and universities at that point and shows little sign of starting again, even as the demand for higher education is becoming more and more acute. The United States is one of the few major economies with a growing college-age population, and employers will need a more educated workforce in the future. A recent report by McKinsey & Co. projected that, by 2020, the United States will need an additional million students a year to remain economically competitive. Yet since 1965, California has built only one new campus for the UC system (in Merced) and three new campuses for the CSU system. Much more tellingly, it built only two new community colleges in the years between 1978 and 2000. The CSU systemthe largest single university system in the country, with more than 400,000 studentshas frozen its fall admissions cycle until after the November elections and has canceled its spring 2013 admissions altogether. Indeed, it's easy to imagine a scenario where, rather than expanding to meet new demand, universities built to educate the public, at public expense, begin to go under.

Two specific developments in post-Reagan California help to explain why this is happening: in 1978 California passed the infamous Proposition 13, greatly restricting the state's capacity to raise revenue through property taxes; and in the 1980s it began one of the great prison-building booms of our time, or what historian Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the "Golden Gulag," expanding the incarcerated population in California by 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. While Proposition 13 dramatically limited the total revenue in the state's coffers, the prison boom diminished the percentage of total funds available for higher education. The portion of the shrinking general fund that could go to expanding public institutional capacity has decreased from around 17 to 10 percent since the late 1970s. For every $1,000 of personal income in California, the state invested only $7.71 for higher education in 2008, about 40 percent below the $12.86 invested as late as 1980.

If the mathematics are simple, the policy implications are complex. What has succeeded the Master Plan is no plan; instead of committing to making room for all students, the state now educates only those it has room for. When the supply of a good or service is capped, economists expect first to see price increases and then to see rationing. And although the skyrocketing price of higher education has been most widely felt, the rationing of classes that teach necessary skills may prove to be just as much of a challenge. As the New York Times's Catherine Rampell has reported, state colleges and community colleges are canceling or otherwise limiting enrollment in technical, engineering, health care, and nursing programs that are relatively expensive to teach. A North Carolina community college has a waiting list to get on waiting list for nursing

classes at a time when there is a severe nursing shortage in the country. Half of California's teachers are educated in the CSU system. What if there is no fall incoming class?

SUBJECT: POLS1: American Government