Finalized in 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Education coordinated the provision of public postsecondary education in the Golden State. It enacted a series of compromises between the University of California (UC) system and California’s state colleges, with community colleges, which had much less political influence, taking a backseat. As detailed in Andrew Stone Higgins’s Higher Education for All, the Master Plan created an advisory board to coordinate these institutions, promised that higher education would remain tuition-free for California residents, and recalibrated a tiered approach to admissions based largely on standardized test scores and grades. In response to a surge in the number of high school graduates, the Master Plan lowered the proportion of seniors guaranteed admission to a UC campus from 15 percent to 12.5 percent of applicants, reduced the proportion accepted by state colleges from 45 percent to 33 percent, and instructed two-year community colleges to enroll the remainder. The Master Plan also reduced the number of places set aside for “students who could make special contributions to campus life … and students who had shown ability to overcome disadvantage” from 10 percent to 2 percent of UC’s enrollment (98). These adjustments generated UC student bodies that were disproportionately wealthy and, for a time, almost entirely white.
Higher Education for All portrays the Master Plan as a symbol of the flaws and achievements of postwar higher education, characterized by white supremacy and a strengthening alliance between universities, industry, and the federal government. This lens enables Higgins to explore large portions of California’s higher education landscape, even if sections of the book are only tangentially related to specific components of the Master Plan. This decision was probably wise, since a detailed account of disputes among university leaders and state officials regarding the sixty-seven agreements that comprised the plan could have made for dull reading. Instead, a good deal of the book focuses on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley, and the student activists who advocated for increasing racial diversity, support programs, and ethnic studies departments at public colleges and universities across the state.
Much of Higher Education for All covers ground that has been explored by other historians. The first chapter details the manner in which the Cold War fueled investments in American higher education, including the National Defense Education Act and the Master Plan. The second chapter recasts the history of the FSM as a protest against the ideology of the Master Plan and its embrace of the university as a “knowledge factory” (53). The third chapter surveys the conservative backlash against Berkeley and the entirety of California’s higher education system. Although the New Right did not take direct aim at the stratified tiers of the Master Plan, Governor Ronald Reagan’s efforts to cut funding jeopardized the provision of tuition-free enrollment and sapped resources from programs that were designed to recruit and support the 2 percent of students who were admitted to UC due to their “special contributions” or/and their ability to overcome adversity. Reagan attempted to address concerns about these cuts by promising to provide scholarships and loans to cover the expenses of low-income students. Strikingly, Reagan criticized the UC system for becoming “almost closed campuses, available mainly to those who come from upper middle class white families” (90). Regardless of what one might say about Reagan’s sincerity, his proposal presaged the high-tuition/high-aid model pursued, for better or worse, by many institutions in our era.
The final three chapters of Higher Education for All recount the story of the Black and Chicano students who campaigned against the racial and socioeconomic disproportionality that the Master Plan institutionalized. Higgins provides new details about the origins of Black Student Unions and the development of El Plan de Santa Barbara (aka the “Master Plan for Chicanos in higher education”). Student activists and their allies regarded the Master Plan’s admission standards as “inherently racist” (p. 1). Although they failed to change the plan’s tiered admissions process, these activists won significant victories by lobbying for the establishment of Educational Opportunity Programs (EOPs), which helped to attract and retain the students who filled the aforementioned 2 percent of UC’s seats. These students also shaped access to California’s state colleges. For example, when the EOP at San Fernando Valley State University (now California State University, Northridge) announced a plan to recruit fifteen students of color, student leaders pressured administrators to increase this number to seven hundred. Student groups were given substantial control of this initiative and took charge of the recruitment and selection of applicants. Higgins credits EOPs with enabling the UC system and California’s state colleges to continue diversifying even after the Bakke decision outlawed the use of admissions quotas. He highlights the role played by student-athletes, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Tommie Smith, whose hypervisibility and experiences with racism fueled their advocacy for greater representation and equitable treatment. Higgins also effectively draws on newspaper accounts about community colleges, a higher education sector that is often underemphasized by historians.
Higher Education for All occasionally mentions this historiography, although it disregards several important works, such as Joy Williamson-Lott’s Black Power on Campus (2003) and Chris Loss’s Between Citizens and the State (2011), that are relevant to subjects explored by the book. It’s possible that Higgins’s focus on California’s institutions of higher education limited his interest in this national context. An overriding focus on California is understandable in light of the state’s outsized influence as a model system of public higher education and its status as a bellwether for national stances toward taxation and affirmative action. There is also value in aspiring to employ a broader historiographical frame of reference than the one sometimes employed by historians of higher education, myself included. Rather than attempting to open a dialogue with our subfield, Higgins seeks to engage with “the historiography of Cold War liberalism, postwar conservatism, and … the New Left” (7).
Ultimately, Higher Education for All speaks to activists as much as to historians. Higgins starts and ends with an account of student protests against tuition increases at California public colleges and universities in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. He notes that current debates about access often invoke an oversimplified version of the Master Plan that refer to it as an artifact of a postwar heyday of generous state funding. As is the case with most “golden age” narratives, the historical record is more complex. Higher Education for All illustrates how the Master Plan strengthened California’s commitment to college access, while reifying institutional stratification and the underrepresentation of students of color and working-class white students on the more prestigious and better-funded campuses of the UC system. For those inspired by the example of the students who campaigned against these inequitable consequences, the Master Plan should serve as “an example and a warning” (7).
