Issue Briefs: Student Fees
Historical Context
The Master Plan
The ideals of readily available and free public education were expressed in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which sought to differentiate, systematize, and coordinate the functions of the state's already extensively developed segments of higher education. The authors of the Master Plan believed that the “traditional policy of nearly a century of tuition-free higher education is in the best interests of the state and should be continued.” For the state colleges (later to become the CSU) and the University of California they recommended that “the two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California . . . be tuition free to all residents of the state.” The Master Plan did provide for the establishment of fees to cover costs ancillary to tuition, taking care to define these fees as being other than instructionally related—a distinction that persists to the present day.
The Master Plan has been revisited several times since 1960, though none of the subsequent iterations commands the authority of the first. Not all committees considering the future of California higher education have struck accord with the original authors’ insistence upon tuition-free colleges and universities. The 1971 report stated (in an afterword) that “Low or no tuition serves the poor. The vast majority of those who benefit are not poor.” The 1987 report recognized that while the legislature had established the state as primarily responsible for the cost of postsecondary education, students in all three public segments should bear part of the total cost of their education. The report stated that fees should be low, with any increases being “gradual, moderate, and predictable.” The phrase "gradual, moderate, and predictable" has become a mantra but was repealed from the statutes in 1992. The most recent reconsideration of the Master Plan, finalized at the beginning of this year, again calls for a policy to stabilize student fees.