UC Schools (Read: Entire State) Going Down the Drain?

OK, maybe the school system’s plight isn’t quite that drastic, but it sure is taking some heavy blows.  George Will writes about how liberalism is killing California (not an unfamiliar subject for him), and slowly devouring the once great school system.  The irony, of course, being that increased liberalism is what UC schools have always been demanding.

Here are some facts according to Will: the UC system’s budget was cut 20 percent, and the system increased in-state student fees 32 percent (although still relatively low). In addition to this, the (separate) Cal State system is enrolling 40,000 fewer students this academic year.  A few other California fun facts: the state has experienced a loss of 25% of its factory jobs, and 35% of its high-tech manufacturing jobs.  On a somewhat humorous, albeit unsurprising note, the number of government employees rose 25%.  Being a native of central California, I used to regret in my VA high school that I would no longer be able to utilize the advantage of in-state UC schools.  Perhaps it wasn’t a giant loss.

In its impact on the institution, and on students trying to grip the lower rungs of the ladder of social mobility, the UC system’s crisis is sad. This academic year, only one-sixth of the normal number of new faculty have been hired at Berkeley. The Cal State system — a cut below the UC campuses — will enroll 40,000 fewer students this year than last. But because the professoriate is overwhelmingly liberal, there is rough justice in its having to live with liberalism’s consequences, which include this:

Kevin Starr, author of an eight-volume — so far — history of the (formerly) Golden State, says that California is “on the verge” of becoming something without an American precedent: “a failed state.” William Voegeli, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, tartly says that “Rome wasn’t sacked in a day, and California didn’t become Argentina overnight.” Indeed.

Voegeli says that if California’s spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly “a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”