California’s Higher Education Disaster - Kevin Carey, the Quick and Ed,

The California public higher education system is built like a three-layer ziggurat with a wide base and narrow top. In round numbers, every year about 400,000 students graduate from high school in California and half of them immediately go to college in-state. 30,000 top students are allowed to go to a UC campus. Another 50,000 or so enroll in the middle-tier California State University campus. The remaining 120,000 go to community college. There is no place for her, at first, in a four-year in-state public university. For the system to function effectively, therefore, students who start at community colleges need to be able to transfer into four-year universities to complete a bachelor’s degree. Usually, that means California State, which has historically taken more than four community college transfers for every one who is admitted to the more selective UC. As the chart shows, as recently as three years ago, CSU was taking 55,000 community college transfers a year. Two years ago, that number dropped by 2,000. In 2010, it dropped by another 12,000 students.