At San Francisco State University, 2023 marked the lowest enrollment in almost half a century. That is, until 2024, when SFSU enrollment dropped again: from the previous year’s 23,700 total undergraduate and graduate students to only 22,375 students. In fact, a steady decline had begun back in 2018, which was then accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, according to SF State President Lynn Mahoney, this decline extend into the foreseeable future (this is due to the demographics of the state—the majority of Californians live in the south—and the so-called demographic cliff—a decline in national birth rates attributed to the 2008 financial crisis).

However, across the Bay from SF State, the University of California–Berkeley enjoys booming admissions. One of the flagships of the entire UC system, Berkeley boasts an 11.7 percent acceptable rate, nearly 80 percent of whom are California residents. Clearly, neither tuition ($8,256 in-state for SF State and $17,478 for UC Berkeley), the application processes (while both systems no longer require standardized test scores, Berkeley’s holistic review takes into consider things beyond high school grades, like extracurriculars and high school rank), nor the exorbitant cost of living in the Bay Area are what’s keeping would-be college students from attending SF State rather than Berkeley.

Resources and prestige are seemingly obvious reasons for the differing circumstances of these two institutions—and to a varying extent between the University of California System and the California State University System more generally. The accruing of both to the UCs at the expense of the CSUs and community colleges—as Andrew Stone Higgins argues in Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan—was an intentional project of the much renowned Master Plan. Though often remembered through rose-colored glasses for its promise of free tuition for California residents, the Master Plan was lambasted by the student activists of the 1960s for enshrining institutional hierarchy into public higher education and thus exacerbating racial and economic inequality. Perhaps the most influential higher education policy of the 20th century, the Master Plan, and the critiques against it, offer important insights into our current crises of higher education.

Thus, long before U.S. News and World Report began to issue its asinine and insidious college rankings, the Master Plan created a tiered education system in the guise of public good by not only differentiating the function of each institution but also the students they should admit. Before the Master Plan, as Higgins recounts, “the UC had accepted the top 15 percent of graduating high school seniors from California, and the state colleges had taken on upward of the top 45 percent. After the Master Plan, the UC would begin to curb admissions to the top 12.5 percent of students, while the state colleges set a firm limit of 33 percent. The remaining 67 percent—up from 55 percent prior to the Master Plan—were consigned to community colleges.” Due to racial segregation, that meant California’s minorities students were by and large relegated to community colleges that received less funding. Though ostensibly the plan promised easy transfer from community colleges to the four-year institutions, the vast majority of community college students at the time never did—and today fewer than 10 percent do. And the UC system has only gotten more competitive: Today the UC Statewide guarantee only applies to the top 9 percent of California high school graduates—and not to their campus of choice.

Given this institutional baggage, it doesn’t inspire much confidence that the latest plan to save California state schools like SF State doesn’t target the real issues. Instead, to combat declining enrollment, SF State and a number of other struggling schools in the Cal State University System (CSU) have turned to a seemingly progressive solution, launching this fall 2025.

“Direct admissions” allow colleges to automatically admit students that meet minimum criteria. In the case of California, the state’s new pilot program—especially hoping to attract low-income, nontraditional, and Black and brown students—will offer direct, conditional admissions to 10 of the CSU’s 23 universities to qualified high school seniors in Riverside County, one of the fastest growing counties in the state. Cal State East Bay, located south of Oakland in Hayward, will launch a similar program for high school graduates of Hayward and neighboring San Leandro public schools. CSU is following in the footsteps of over a dozen other states, including Illinois, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, and Idaho, the first state to implement direct enrollment in 2015.

The CSUs and many struggling regional public universities have turned to open admissions. Simplifying access for low income, nontraditional, and Black and brown students through direct admissions is an admirable goal, but the desire to increase enrollment is really a desire to increase tuition receipts, whether from students themselves or federal aid like Pell grants.

The CSU system boasts being “the nation’s largest four-year public university system, providing transformational opportunities for upward mobility to more than 450,000 students from all socioeconomic backgrounds” with over “one in every 20 Americans holding a college degree [from] CSU.” Their and other non-flagship public universities’ ability to continue to be the “the workhorse of social mobility” was jeopardized well before Trump—the result of a decades-long, bipartisan retreat at the state and federal level from funding public higher education, with California and the Master Plan at the vanguard. Neoliberal competition between colleges for funds has only exacerbated this trend.

Unfortunately, as the dismantling of affirmative action makes clear, many Americans may not want to stop institutional racism.

Ronald Reagan made his political career, and the new right itself, during his successful gubernatorial campaign of 1966, by, in the words of Higgins, “focus[ing] his ire on the three key issues of race, the Vietnam War, and public higher education.” However, the student activists that he hoped to squash—the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and later the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front 1968 strike at SF State—had largely emerged to protest the supposedly more liberal 1960 Master Plan for making public higher education a tool of the US war machine and racial segregation.

While the issue facing public universities in the 21st century is low enrollment and demographic declines, the Master Plan sought to prepare California’s institutions of higher education for the demographic boom and scientific arms race of the Cold War era. Though a number of California policymakers were involved, the plan was largely a compromise between Roy Simpson, Superintendent of Public Instruction and thus de facto head of the California State College (later university) system, and Clark Kerr, the president of the UCs. While Simpson sought to gain more prestige for the state colleges, Kerr wanted to maintain the UC’s monopoly on scientific research in the wake of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. When the Master Plan was sign into law in 1960, the community colleges were charged with “technical training,” the state colleges with “occupational training,” and the UCs with “professional training.” This division largely still holds, with the UCs monopolizing doctoral programs and the CSUs fighting to keep California’s community colleges from offering bachelor degrees.

Though Kerr has long been revered as the mastermind of the Master Plan, both he and Simpson held what Higgins cogently argues was an “instrumentalist vision of educational attainment above any consideration of the effects their system would have on California’s large and diverse minority population.” Neither California’s diverse population, nor the growing number of women entering higher education were concerns for the architects of the Master Plan. The Master Plan inaugurated many of the problems facing higher education today—the overemphasis on STEM education; the dependence on federal and private funding for questionable, warmongering and surveilling industries; and the funneling of public funds to the already privileged. While we can indeed blame Reagan and the new right for laying the groundwork for public universities’ dependence on tuition, the antidemocratic structure of the Master Plan laid the groundwork for public education as individual, private good and, in the words of Kerr, “‘a society much like a modern university—highly competitive, essentially undemocratic, effective.’” That sounds strikingly like Trump’s vision for higher ed.

The student activists at the time recognized this contraction of access for what it was. Higgins surveys a large sample of student movements throughout the state—from Berkeley’s famed Free Speech Movement and the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front Stike at SF State to the Chicano Master Plan for Higher Education at UC Santa Barbara. The Third World Liberation Front’s strike was as much a struggle for Black and ethnic studies as it was one for more diverse admissions and faculty hiring. Higgins opens his history of the Master Plan and student critique with a March 1971 article by UC Davis student-activist Fusha Hill published in the student paper, the California Aggie:  “Black students are attempting to show the academic community that the policies laid down in the Master Plan are inherently racist.” A month later excerpts from the piece were republished in Fresno State’s Daily Collegian because, as Higgins explains, “Hill’s critique could speak to the concerns of student activists at both the UC and state colleges, as well as California’s community colleges, because all three systems were regulated by the admissions standards that had been established by the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education.” Originally titled “Davis Campus Community Effort in Support of a Meaningful UC Budget,” the Daily Collegian  retitled the piece “Open Admissions Stop Institutional Racism” and signed it “the Third World.”

Unfortunately, as the dismantling of affirmative action makes clear, many Americans may not want to stop institutional racism. However, part of why the right’s campaign against affirmative action was so successful is that admissions criteria at selective universities, including public flagships, seem nebulous and arbitrary. And, coupled with rising costs, many Americans are beginning to question the value of a college education at all. In favoring selectivity over the public good, the Master Plan laid the groundwork for some colleges to be perceived as less worth attending than others. Rather than a means to bail out the budgets of cash trapped public regional universities, open admissions to all state-funded public universities—including prestigious flagships like UC Berkeley—could break the competitive concentration of prestige, increase affordability through more egalitarian institutional funding, and restore Americans’ faith in higher education as a public, rather than “highly competitive, undemocratic” good.