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The nation’s institutions of higher education are a source of immense pride for our states and communities and central to the dreams of millions of young people and their families. In a society where knowledge and credentials are essential for success, higher education offers the best chance for a bright future. For students without powerful family resources, it is often the only chance to securely arrive in the middle class. In a very rapidly changing society with large and growing populations of non-White students, figuring out how higher education can serve a highly diverse and economically stratified society is an immense challenge. Very few institutions will have so large an impact on the future of our nation as our colleges and universities. Great public universities, like the University of California, are tangible expressions of the commitment of the generations that created them in order to increase opportunity and build an economically strong society. That commitment lasted through wars and depressions and expressed the deeply shared ideas of progress and mobility within American society. Postwar California built its booming economy, in good part, on the remarkable creation of a system of world-class public research universities and a vast expansion of campuses to serve the state’s youth. When one looks at the present situation and compares what has been funded with what is truly needed, however, the picture is disconcerting. As the 277 GARY ORFIELD PATRICIA GÁNDARA Chapter Twelve Conclusion: Fateful Decisions need escalates, the commitment wanes and the resources and policies fall short. In the economic booms of the 1980s and 1990s, we failed to make the bold commitments to expanding opportunities that past generations made under much less favorable conditions. We cut our taxes, failed to control costs in health care, criminal justice, and the military and reduced our investment in human capital. In national higher education policy, we shifted more subsidies from the poor to the middle class. Those most hurt by the failure to keep the promise of earlier generations are the surging numbers of low-income students and students of color who are the majority now in California and will soon become the majority nationally. The studies reported in this book offered two fundamentally different diagnoses of where we are and what we need to do about access to higher education . One was the vision of those within the system of the nation’s largest state, people who have invested their skills and intelligence in trying to make a system with some remarkable achievements work in hard times. Those chapters tended to recognize problems and propose adjustments—things that the authors believed are actually possible to achieve in a polarized political environment and in a public sector starved of resources and burdened by uncontrollable expenses. These are serious, practical, and very useful suggestions . Many of the changes they suggested can be done and should be done. But they are not enough. On the other hand are researchers who looked at the entire system and saw massive failure to serve the state’s rapidly growing and changing population , a failure that extends through all levels of public education. They concluded that there is fundamental injustice in the system and that sweeping changes would be needed at all levels of education if the state wishes to avert certain economic and social catastrophe. Their recommendations would obviously require much larger public resources to both give higher priority to higher education in general and to specific policies to increase equity. These analyses suggest that marginal changes simply cannot deal with problems of the scale that state higher education systems are now facing. We believe that there are important things that can make a difference for many students now, some of which would merely involve reversing recent decisions that are making a bad situation even worse. Given all the obstacles to large policy changes in a conservative era with limited public resources, it is important to do as many of these things as possible and as quickly as we can. If we could eliminate obviously unfair advantages such as giving some students from affluent schools credit for taking courses that do not even exist in schools serving the most poor children, that would help a little. If we could automatically place students with little knowledge about high school courses into classes that could make college a viable option unless they opted out and signed a statement saying they did not want to go to college, it would...

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