Degrees Of Difference: The Fight Over Diplomas Roiling California’s Public Colleges

SACRAMENTO, California — A turf war is heating up between California’s public universities over the granting of degrees.

For decades, the University of California and California State University have enjoyed the right to award bachelor’s degrees, while the state’s expansive network of community colleges has been all but shut out of the action. Two bills now being debated by the Legislature would disrupt that near duopoly, mounting the biggest challenge in years to lines of authority in higher education that have gone largely unchanged since 1960.

The push to expand the reach of community colleges stems from a growing frustration among some higher education officials, state lawmakers and advocates that old boundaries have left the state stuck in the past as the public’s changing attitudes and expectations about college have put pressure on them to adapt. But UC and CSU officials have resisted, saying the proposed laws would bestow too much unchecked power on community colleges and bring about only piecemeal change.

“You’ve got two very, very large institutions that have done things the same way for 66 years, and we're asking them to be a little bit more flexible and nimble,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, who is authoring one of the bills. “It’s hard for folks to accept change.”

The tension underscores how the three prongs of the country’s largest system of publicly funded higher education are, in fact, competitors in a cut-throat industry, each looking to boost and protect their own reputations and market share. The constant drive to enroll students and maximize state funding could impede attempts at change.

Efforts to strike a deal on the legislation continued this week as Alvarez and state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, author of the second bill, met with CSU officials to discuss amendments they hoped would persuade them to drop their opposition. Alvarez, in an interview, said the talks had shifted to more technical issues and away from broader objections CSU officials voiced earlier.

The UC is also opposed to Alvarez’s bill but has been less vocal, as the CSU would feel the brunt of the impact of the legislation. UC officials said they likely would remove opposition if an agreement is reached. 

Under the current rules, the UC generally is alone in the ability to confer all graduate and undergraduate degrees, including Ph.Ds. At CSU, besides a select number of doctoral programs, students can go no higher than a master’s degree. Community college students, meanwhile, are left for the most part with the option to earn an associate degree or apply to transfer to UC or CSU after completing a few years of classwork.

Alvarez’s bill would authorize a community college to offer a bachelor’s degree in a particular subject if employment data from the region indicate a need for more graduates in that field of study. Under Cabaldon’s proposal, if a CSU campus doesn’t have space to accept all the qualified applicants to a field of study for three consecutive years, a nearby community college could offer a bachelor’s degree in the subject beginning in 2030.

Other pieces of legislation call for 10 community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in nursing as part of a pilot program and for the Southwestern Community College District in San Diego to create baccalaureate degree programs. 

The measures face a deadline at the end of the month to clear the Legislature and would then go to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature or veto. The debate in California over what roles its various universities should fill is part of a nationwide push to increase the number of states that permit community colleges to offer four-year degrees. Currently, half of states do so.

While he has not weighed in on this year’s deliberations, Newsom has vetoed the nursing proposal the last two years. In rejecting the proposed law, the governor noted his reluctance to expand community colleges’ ability to offer bachelor’s degrees, saying the school system should focus instead on the small number of degrees it currently is allowed to award.

“This does feel like a make-it-or-break moment for California,” said Josh Hagen, vice president of policy and advocacy for the Campaign for College Opportunity, which is backing the legislative push. “We're erring towards a public debate where systems and institutions are fighting over students versus fighting for them.”

Kathleen Fullerton, the UC’s associate vice president and director of state governmental relations, said in a statement that “if there’s truly a demand — and particularly a workforce demand — that needs to be met by offering more bachelor's degrees that our current CSU and UC systems can't offer, then we should do it.”

The bills are an attempt to revisit past decisions. As baby boomers reached college age in the 1950s, state officials anticipating a surge of students released in 1960 “A Master Plan for Higher Education In California,” a blueprint that carved out fiefdoms for UC, CSU and community colleges by designating which degrees each could offer. Then-Gov. Edmund Brown described it at the time as “the most significant step California has ever taken in the planning for the education of our youth.”

But the state has changed dramatically in the decades since. With more people applying to college, far greater diversity in the applicant pools and heightened demands from the labor market for students educated in specialized fields, the state’s public schools haven’t changed with the times, critics say.

While it once was primarily 18- to 20-year-old students applying for college, “now it's people from all different ages, all different points of their career, all different kinds of lived realities and experiences,” said Assemblymember Marc Berman, who chairs a legislative committee that is reviewing the master plan. “It's just more complicated.”

Berman and other lawmakers have been trying to chip away at the master plan for years. In 2014, nearly a decade after the Legislature gave CSU campuses permission to run doctoral programs in select fields, they granted 15 community colleges the go-ahead to award bachelor's degrees in a limited number of study areas. The number of community colleges with that authority has grown to 50 today.

But it remains far from a level playing field for community colleges. While Bakersfield College, for example, offers a bachelor degree in industrial automation and Feather River College in wildfire-prone Plumas County awards one in ecosystem restoration and applied fire, they were able to do so only after checking whether their programs would overlap with anything offered by CSU or UC anywhere in the state.

Gregory Smith, chancellor at the San Diego Community College District, said that an objection to Mesa College offering a degree in physical therapy by CSU San Bernardino — which is located 100 miles away — delayed approval by three years.

“I think that process creates a great illustration of why the contentiousness between our systems around these degrees is not grounded, in fact, and is only harming our communities,” Smith said.

And, to win permission to issue a bachelor’s degree a community college school must submit data and other documentation showing there is an “unmet workforce need” in the subject area, such as evidence of employers struggling to fill positions.

David O’Brien, vice chancellor of external relations for the community colleges, said the schools are “not seeking broad authority to offer every single type of degree that the UC or the CSU have.”

“That's never been our intention,” O’Brien said. “We are seeking to specialize in what community colleges do best, which is working with local employers and industries to meet the needs of our students.”

Cal State officials maintain that they are not opposed outright to community colleges being able to offer more bachelor’s degrees, noting that they have signed off on 80 percent of the degrees proposed by the schools.

But they want more guardrails than lawmakers have proposed, including requiring more data and accountability measures from community colleges on attrition rates and student outcomes, officials wrote in a letter opposing the bills. They also want the flexibility to consider developing joint programs with community colleges before giving their blessing for a degree that duplicates one offered by CSU.

“It’s gotten played as we're just saying, ‘no,’” said Junius Gonzales, CSU’s vice chancellor of academic affairs. “We're saying ‘yes,’ but in a thoughtful way.”

Alvarez said he had agreed to amend his bill to impose a tighter cap on the number of bachelor’s degrees a community college district can offer and to restrict community colleges from offering degrees online if the CSU does so in a similar field. He also agreed to rely on independent data to verify workforce needs for a new degree rather than the community colleges’ own analysis.

The California Faculty Association, the union representing CSU professors, has also raised concerns — a rare piece of common ground with a university it typically fights at the bargaining table. Michelle Ramos Pellicia, the union’s vice president, said that the community colleges’ push for more autonomy amounts to a “mission creep” and would only “duplicate bureaucracy” between the two systems. Ramos Pellicia also worried that additional state funding would be allocated to the community colleges, potentially taking away dollars from the CSU system.

“It's going to take away resources from faculty and students in the CSU at a time when higher ed is being attacked by an authoritarian fascist regime,” Ramos Pellicia said, referring to the Trump administration. “It's of great concern.”

CSU faculty have long expressed concern about their community college peers offering bachelor’s degrees, with the academic senate arguing in a 2022 resolution that it could reduce enrollment and student fees and eventually lead to fewer state dollars.

If a deal on the legislation is not reached this year, lawmakers will almost certainly be returning next year with “10 or 12 or 15 bills,” according to Cabaldon, who is carrying the Senate proposal. “The issue is not going away,” Cabaldon said.

But the ongoing tug-of-war between three massive systems competing for funding, enrollment and prestige in the nation’s most populous state could remain a barrier to reform. Last week, a fiscal committee in the state Senate declined to advance a measure by Berman that would have helped standardize how course credits are transferred between the three systems amid opposition from faculty groups.

The committee also killed a proposed pilot program for students at CSU Long Beach who have left school to retroactively get associate degrees for coursework completed. That measure was opposed by the community college system. Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, the bill’s author, said that it was "unfortunate" that his proposal appeared to be a casualty of the ongoing turf war, which can “rear its ugly head when innovative bills come out.”

“The only politics more challenging than politics are higher ed politics,” Lowenthal said.