Money. The price for Community College has gone up and down over the years … but I completed my lower division classwork for $20 total … where else in the USA can one get two years college education for $20?
The Illinois system has a lot fewer universities, and it’s much less selective. Berkeley admits <25%, UIUC over 60%. They are fine schools, but there just isn’t enough differentiation to create a world-class unique institution.
I went to UIUC for grad school, and some departments were world-class and some weren’t. But then at least there was a big difference between it and the smaller regional colleges which were like CUs. While Berkleley is highly selective, some UCs are much less selective. We just have more top tier choices than Illinois does.
No kidding! Between community colleges and the CalState system I got my BA for less than a used car would have cost me. Toss in the graduate work and it was still cheaper than a new car. Probably because a portion of said graduate work was through the UC system.
California has such a good system because we have always valued education and have been willing to back that with tax dollars. Since we’ve gotten a certain group out of state government, we’ve been able to fix the budget and get school monies flowing again.
Does that mean we’ll be paying higher taxes? Maybe, but I will pay them willingly. As Oliver Wendell Holmes noted - “Taxes are how we buy Civilization.”
Rankings-wise, the Texas schools are somewhat hamstrung by certain legislation mandating automatic admission for people in the top 10% of their high school graduating classes. In practical terms, this means that both A&M and UT are forced to accept a fair number of probably unqualified students who subsequently can’t hack it and leave. This is the fault of the state legislature, not a choice the universities themselves made.
This both makes them look less selective than they used to be, and makes their graduation percentages also lower than they used to be, both of which are criteria used in most rankings.
People talk about how good UC Berkeley is, but that’s just one campus of a larger University of California system … now add in UCLA, UCSF, UC Davis, UCSD … if viewed as a single university, why, it’s the finest in the world … bar none.
That doesn’t include the California State University system, dozens more public colleges … including BOTH CalTechs … Public Education done right.
Minor point of clarification: UCSF is unique in that it is only a graduate level institution, focusing on Health Sciences. It’s not quite like the other schools in the UC system, all of which have undergraduate programs.
I was born there … with complications … so she has a special place in my own heart.
My wife and I were just talking about this since our son recently was accepted at Cal Poly Pomona. It and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo are another example of the good+cheap college opportunities in California.
We think a lot of the reason is geographic. There’s a lot of low-population states separating California from the other high-population states. If you grow up in Cali and want to go to college out of state, you have to travel a looooooong way to get there. This has encouraged the growth of a lot of high-quality local schools.
That’s a good point. A lot of my kids’ friends, and their parents, hardly ever left California, and going outside the state just seemed scary. Since my kids moved here from out of state, they both went to college out of state, even though my eldest went to Cal half time during her senior year of high school, and was matriculated then.
In some ways we’re like Oz with a big desert around us.
First, my apologies about two CalTechs, that should have read “BOTH Cal Poly’s”
A friend of my sons grew up in San Diego and went to Humboldt State, 900 miles was as far as she could get away from her parents and still get in-state tuition. Pretty sure Texas is the only only state you can do that.
Glad to see folks ITT talking about the bennies of the CSU system. In most of the discussions about public higher ed in CA, most people tend to focus entirely on the UC system, forgetting that there is another equally vast public uni vis-a-vis the CSU.
Even though higher ed in CA was basically free for people 50 years ago - thanks for changing that, by the way, Saint Ronnie of Reagan - it’s still remarkably affordable for most CA residents who decide to go to one of our public universities. Seriously, if a CA resident makes smart decisions about choice of school - and falls into the right income bracket - he or she can basically go to college for free here.
At least, that’s how it’s worked out for me. I took the JC ----> CSU route, and I’m not going to owe a dime in student loans by the time I graduate. Graduate school, presumably, is different because aid becomes a lot more stringent at the MA/PhD level, but at least for undergrad CA is going a lot of things right.