by AIDAN WYROUGH

Faced with growing concerns that California’s higher education system is outdated and unresponsive to the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, lawmakers are considering more structural changes to the state Master Plan’s vision of university and college education.

This year a quartet of bills authored by authored by Assemblymember David Alvarez (D-San Diego) and Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria (D-Merced) are proposing to allow community colleges to offer even more baccalaureate programs and the CSU system to offer more doctoral degrees.

“For more than 60 years, the Master Plan has guided California’s higher education system,” Alvarez said in a statement. “But our economy, our population, and our workforce needs have evolved. This package updates our higher education framework to reflect today’s realities. It expands access to affordable bachelor’s and doctoral degrees.

The outcome of education must be aligned to the jobs, and these bills remove outdated barriers that prevent students from accessing opportunities in their own communities.”

Though the California State University (CSU) system can already award some doctoral degrees, the scope of their offerings is limited to those that do not duplicate those provided by the University of California (UC).

For more than 60 years, the Master Plan has guided California’s higher education system…This package updates our higher education framework to reflect today’s realities.

That restriction would go away under AB 2693 (Alvarez), which removes the requirement that the UC must approve any PhD offerings the CSU provides.

Restrictions on the California Community Colleges (CCC) system would also change under AB 2694, which would overturn a law that bars community colleges from offering a BA/BS degree if a similar program exists anywhere in the state. AB 2694 (Alvarez) would bar duplication “only within the same geographic region where there are documented unmet regional workforce needs.”

“AB 2694 ensures that when there is a documented workforce shortage, whether in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, or technology, community colleges can respond,”

Alvarez said. “Students should not be forced into expensive private institutions or out of their region because of rigid, outdated rules.”

Soria’s measure (AB 2301) would establish a pilot program authorizing up to 10 community college districts to offer a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), in an effort to address California’s nursing shortage.

Another Alvarez bill (AB 664) would allow Southwestern College in South San Diego County to offer up to four workforce-aligned bachelor’s degree programs.

If any of these measures are successful, it won’t  be the first time the Master Plan has been altered.

Created in 1960 under Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the Master Plan sought to adjudicate and delineate student pathways by allotting all high school graduates to be eligible for enrollment in community college, for the top 33 percent to be eligible for a CSU and the top 12.5 percent to be eligible for the UC system.

The three systems also had distinctly different missions.

The UC was intended to be the state’s primary scientific research institution as well as offering degrees in liberal arts, the law and medicine. It was also the only one of the three allowed to offer doctoral degrees.

The CSU mission was to provide baccalaureate and master’s degrees in a variety of fields across the liberal arts, sciences and teacher education.

Perhaps most distinctively, the California Community Colleges system was intended focus on workforce training, adult education, remedial coursework and lower level academic degrees that were guaranteed pathways to acceptance at a four-year institution.

The Master Plan has been updated a number of times, notably in 1999 with the passage of AB 1570, required the California Postsecondary Education Commission to develop a comprehensive data base to be used in assessing and addressing higher education issues and policy.

In 2014, lawmakers endorsed SB 850, a pilot program which gave community colleges the ability to offer certain bachelor’s programs. In 2021 lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed AB 927, which made the program permanent.

Dr. Steven Brint of UC Riverside, who has written widely on higher education and taught at Yale, New York University and Boston College, says the primary incentive for community colleges to offer these programs is “to make their institutions more attractive to students who want a higher level degree,” which would make them more popular in their regions.

But he also notes that these changes are not welcomed by everyone.

“Obviously, the higher tier institutions aren’t going like it,” Brint said.

There is a good reason for that, says Dr. Christine Miller, Sacramento State professor and previous chair of the CSU Academic Senate.

“One of the reasons behind the Master Plan was for managing the state allocations needed to fund each of the three systems’ missions. And as the mission erodes, the allocations shift,” she says. “Follow the money. New competition could mean one system losing the standing to argue they ought to get those resources over another system.”

Brint also voiced concern that altering the basic structure of the community college system and the type of student that system has traditionally served could negatively impact the potential output of their programs.

“So many people have trouble getting through community college for a whole wide variety of reasons,” Brint said. “They have professors that are mostly not full-time professors, they so often have confusing curricula [and] many of the people at community college have only one foot in and they’re working full-time.”

“Follow the money. New competition could mean one system losing the standing to argue they ought to get those resources over another system.”

Miller says there is also a major difference in teaching loads for professors, which would also directly impact students.

“Teaching loads for community college instructors are more like high school,” she said. “They might have five or six classes.”

That can be very different for at higher levels, where a CSU professor, depending on the program and specific CSU, may only teach three to four classes a semester. With the demands of research at the UC, a professor there might teach only one class a year.

She called it a heavy ask to then ask a community college instructor to teach to the baccalaureate level for that many classes.

She believes these changes could radically impact the individual missions of each of the systems. Miller says this is not necessarily a bad thing and evolving the Master Plan does not destroy its relevance or indicate a need for even greater wholesale changes.

“I think there have been some expansions of the Master Plan in ways that may not have been originally envisioned. But I don’t think those expansions mean that there’s a wholesale rejection of the Master Plan.”

All four bills are now in the Assembly Committee on Higher Education. The deadline to pass policy bills is April 24^th.

Aidan Wyrough is an intern with Capitol Weekly’s Public Policy Journalism Internship program. This story was originally posted by Capitol Weekly on 4/1/26.