California Journal of Politics and Policy

After three decades of state disinvestment, the University of California (UC) faces significant challenges and misunderstandings regarding its operating costs, its mission, and its wide array of activities. Reduced funding from the state for public higher education, including UC, has essentially severed the historic link between state allocations and enrollment workload, altering the incentive and ability for UC to expand academic programs and enrollment in pace with California’s growing population and economic needs – what formed an important component of its historic social contract. “To grow or not to grow?” is the question that now confronts the University of California and, more generally, Californians. On the positive side, an improved economy offers a window for a renewed commitment to fund public high education. Yet the most recent budget deal with the state provides only a marginal reinvestment in the university and restricts its ability to move toward a new funding model. The historic commitment to grow with the needs of California that propelled much of the state’s economic activity and socioeconomic mobility is, for the first time, an unfunded mandate with little prospect for resurrection in the immediate term. Without adequate state funding, and with a high level of institutional autonomy guaranteed in the state constitution, the university community is much less likely to continue the path of unfunded enrollment growth that erodes the quality of its teaching, research, and public service programs.