Particularly troubling is how far California has fallen in the educational attainment race. For most of the 20th century, California was the national leader in higher education access and graduation rates. Now, California is mediocre in terms of access rates, and ranks among the bottom ten states in the proportional number of students who earn a bachelor’s degree.

Yet somehow, the state retains a relatively vibrant economy. One reason is the excellence of its high-tech sector and research centers. Another is that California still ranks among the top ten states in the total number of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The state’s older generation has a higher educational attainment level than the younger generation. And California relies heavily on importing talent: like researchers to Berkeley and technologists to Silicon Valley. Such a high reliance on talent from outside the state and nation, however, may increasingly prove problematic.

Global labor markets for highly skilled people are expanding rapidly. Europe is now the number one destination for international students. In emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil, new research centers are being aggressively nurtured. More and more of these students will seek academic opportunities and jobs somewhere in the world other than California. But attracting talent in a global market and increasing the rate of degrees attained by the domestic population are not mutually exclusive goals. Indeed, these factors will be the hallmarks of the most competitive economies.

Today, the United States enrolls about 19 million students in degree-granting colleges and universities. To match the progress of our economic competitors, we would need to enroll an additional 10 million students over the next 15 years; currently the rate is a quarter of that. Because the private sector has limited ability or interest in growing, most enrollment expansion will have to occur in public higher education. In my view, we need a state and federal partnership similar to what existed in the 1960s, and the leadership of a more enlightened presidential administration, to refocus our efforts to increase college access and graduation rates.

But states like California cannot afford to wait for such a partnership. California’s political leadership should set an ambitious goal to match or exceed the access rate and degree production of the highest achieving states or, better yet, those of a group of international economic competitors. B.A. production rates offer perhaps the best single benchmark for the productivity and impact of a higher-education system. As it has in Europe, goal setting will focus discussion on what the public and private college and university systems need to collectively achieve.

The state also needs to reconsider where students go to college. I fear that California and the nation place too many students in underfunded two-year colleges, where most students are part-time and struggling with their finances. Attrition rates are extremely high, and degree completion extremely low. In California, nearly seven out of ten students are in a community college—the highest ratio in the country and a stark contrast to EU nations. Less than a quarter of the students who enter a California community college subsequently transfer to a four-year college. Even fewer of these obtain a bachelor’s degree.

California must improve the number of students who get a high school diploma and then enter a college or university. We need to improve the fiscal condition and vibrancy of our over 100 community colleges and reduce the number of part-time students. But even making these improvements, pushing so many students into two-year colleges will not significantly improve our degree production rates.

California, and campuses such as Berkeley, should also more actively attract the world’s expanding pool of talented students. Within the University of California system, only some 4 percent of all undergraduates, and only 18 percent at the graduate level, are international students—not enough, in my view, for promoting the state’s global role.

Guiding more students to four-year public institutions, funding them adequately, and making more room for international students will pose a significant political challenge. California must revisit the structure of its higher-education system and ask whether it is, as the British say, “fit for purpose.” Higher education is about the future, our economic competitiveness, and our cultural and political maturity. It is a reasonable ambition for California, with some of the best research universities in the world, to once again actively seek the greatest single higher education system in the world.

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow in Public Policy and Higher Education at Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education adn teh author of The California Idea and American Higher Education. This article is adopted from the final chapter in his new book, The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity and the Social Conract of Public Universities.

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