High schoolers are busy getting their college applications in, now due just after Thanksgiving for UCs and CSUs. Many are nervous about cost.
When I started at UC Berkeley in 1997, tuition was about $3,800 a year. Today, that same year at Cal costs more than $22,000, not including housing, books and all those late-night study burritos. After adjusting for inflation, tuition has tripled in real terms. For families planning for college, it’s hard to look at those numbers without wondering what happened to California’s promise of affordable higher education and ask how we’re supposed to pay for it.
Public higher education in California really was free once. The University of California’s founding charter in 1868 declared that “admission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state.” For nearly a century, UC and CSU charged no tuition, only small “incidental” or “registration” fees. When the California Master Plan for Higher Education was adopted in 1960, it reaffirmed that principle: Public college and university education would remain tuition-free for California residents.
This was the system baby boomers and late Gen Xers inherited. Through the 1960s and much of the 1970s, most California students could attend high-quality UC and CSU campuses for no more than a few hundred dollars a year. These degrees both opened doors and did so without burdening families or graduates with debt. In many ways, that generation’s wealth accumulation, career mobility and alumni networks were materially shaped by this world-class public university system majority funded by taxpayers.
The turning point came in the late 1960s, when Gov. Reagan argued that taxpayers shouldn’t “subsidize intellectual curiosity” and pushed to introduce tuition at California’s public universities. Though his proposal didn’t fully pass, “educational fees” replaced the notion of free instruction. By the late 1970s after Proposition 13 passed, California’s universities began relying heavily on tuition and fees to make up the gap. Costs crept upward through the 1980s and 1990s, but it wasn’t until millennials and Gen Zers entered college that tuition truly skyrocketed.
Between 2000 and 2020, UC tuition more than doubled in inflation-adjusted terms, while CSU’s nearly tripled. During those same decades, wages stagnated, housing costs surged, and the state’s contribution to higher education continued to shrink from 75% in 1975 to less than 40% today. The same four-year public education that cost boomers almost nothing now requires our youth to weigh financial-aid spreadsheets, scholarship essays, and federal loan calculators to afford the now near $100k four-year tuition bill — over $200K all-in.
Still, smart planning can soften the blow. The California College Promise Grant waives enrollment fees and our community colleges now offer two years of free college for those who qualify. High-school students can get a jump on credits through dual enrollment or middle college programs — I did this at College of San Mateo and Skyline College before it was a formal program and started freshman year at Cal with 24 units in the bank. Scholarships and grants help close the rest of the gap. Students who complete the IGETC curriculum and use the Transfer Admission Guarantee program can move directly into a UC or CSU campus as juniors, making obtaining a four-year bachelor’s degree cost less than half.
But as tempting as it is to chase the cheapest path, the full value of college cannot be measured in dollars. The four-year residential experience at a regarded program has a value of its own where new research is born and those late-night conversations turn into friendships, mentors or future business partners. Many of California’s most influential leaders trace their professional and personal networks back to their undergraduate years. Just last week, UC Merced, with its 91% admissions rate, ranked 14th in the nation (third best public university) behind UC Davis and San Jose State, with an 80% admissions rate, ranked fourth best public university. Sometimes the right answer isn’t whichever option costs less, but rather the balance of cost, admissions probability and network. If loneliness is an epidemic and friendships are an antidote, lifelong connections made during this time are invaluable.
College in California was once free because we believed an educated public benefited everyone. Boomers and Gen Xers lived that promise. Millennials and Gen Zers are paying dearly to do the same. So, while the practical goal of graduating without crippling debt is clear, there is a higher goal. California’s economy, its innovation and its global influence was never about individual success but rather what happens when we choose to support intellectual curiosity instead of dismissing it. The decision to invest in minds built Silicon Valley, fueled the arts, advanced medicine and helped make this state the fifth-largest economy in the world. If we want that future to continue, we’ll need to remember what our predecessors knew: Curiosity is the most powerful public investment a society can make.
Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact (tryinteract.com), early stage investor and advisor with The House Fund (thehouse.fund), and a member of the San Mateo County Housing and Community Development Committee. Find Annie on Twitter @meannie.
(4) comments
San Mateo and Santa Clara County are two of the three richest counties in America.
We have some of the richest elementary school districts in the country and the world.
We have the richest high school districts in the world.
We have the richest Universities in the world.
We have the richest public transit agencies in the country.
Here is the real problem why nothing works. None of these entities have to pay property taxes. So they are highly incentivized to own buildings, own land. It's also very easy for them to get to real estate funding through bond measures (50% votes). Many of the politicians and board members running these entities have no business background doing so, but they are in real estate. So every single school district, high school district, public transit agency is adding real estate and building up and out. But this doesn't just cost money, this requires several hundred of additional staff and expensive consulting companies to deal with financing, facility management. You need more custodians, more kitchen staff, more general jobs. Rather than paying ALL their teachers better salaries, all these bad school districts (Redwood City, Mountain View, Jefferson, Community College, etc) are putting the money in "teacher's housing", which turns into "workforce housing" because teachers don't want to live their.
Cities say they can't afford public pools anymore, but every high school features the nicest pools, the best stadiums, the greatest Astroturfs. Elementary districts say they can't afford music programs or PE programs, but universities feature NFL type stadiums and high schools have minor league baseball fields.
For many years now $80-120M per year went from Berkeley's general fund to finance the athletics department.
I saw this ridiculous stat where Stanford and Berkeley have won more Olympic medals than Japan and Germany. During the cold war both countries invested a lot of money into sports, now both have scaled back their investment, because it became too expensive for them with little return-of-investment. But Stanford and Berkeley keep spending and students keep paying with higher tuition.
The whole system is a racket.
Surprised you didnt mention the GI Bill which changed higher education by ending its elitism. BTW: what about the debt of people who dont go to college? Looks as if elitism is back? I suggest you read Eisenhowers farewell speech in which he warns against the "military-industrial complex." He also had concernns over an educational and technological elite. He noted this in the same speech but few people know this. I wonder why. Just curious.
I'm glad you mentioned Eisenhower. He bares a lot of fault as well.
Driving and the gasoline tax is called a "Vice Tax" or "Sin Tax" because it's regarded even worse for health and well being than smoking and alcohol combined. It's the government's job to make driving more expensive and at the same time invest the tax into programs to disincentivize driving even more so. America did it with smoking - they could have put similar effort to reduce the health crisis connected to fossil fuel driving.
At least BEFORE Eisenhower people often had to pay for driving on nice highways (parkways, turnpikes) and the gas tax was used to pay down national debt. That was a solid approach.
But AFTER Eisenhower, the gas tax was used to build more infrastructure and INCENTIVIZE more driving. And he turned the country in a network of FREEWAY (but little for railways). So now their was no toll for driving, gas tax became an infrastructure tax, and national debt started to explode.
He might have complained about the industrial complex, but his FREE-way system did a lot of damage to this country and the current state of national debt.
And of course a country with a lot of national debt can blame it on students and make them pay.
Thanks for your column today, Ms. Tsai, but your “free” public higher education is not free – it is paid for by taxpayers. Many of which are/were not able to take advantage of this “free” public higher education in California. You say between 2000 and 2020, UC tuition more than doubled while CSU’s nearly tripled but how does that compare to the increased number of administrators and faculty in that period? I may need a fact check but I believe there was an article saying UC San Diego had more administrators and faculty than students. Seems to me that today, the ones benefiting more are administrators and associated administrative bloat. Until that issue is addressed, curiosity will remain unaddressed for more and more people as costs continue to increase, for students and taxpayers.
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