Rowing Toward Access and Excellence
In my first eight months as president of the University of California, I’ve prioritized three issues: student access and affordability, protecting our research enterprise, and UC’s responsible leadership in AI. Getting each of these right is essential for UC’s future. But it’s also essential to rebuilding public confidence in higher education — a topic that has been on my mind for the last several years.
A number of structural issues have made higher education increasingly vulnerable to criticism. I recently introduced Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber at UC Berkeley’s prestigious Clark Kerr Lecture, and he articulated some of these criticisms well. One of President Eisgruber’s points was inextricably connected to access and affordability. Over the last several decades, competition for students has intensified while a small group of universities have become far more selective and better resourced. It’s turned college admission into a high-stakes process that fuels anxiety and resentment about access and fairness.
As the leading public university in the world, UC is especially well-positioned to row in the other direction, toward access and excellence, and away from exclusion. And we have. But we need to row harder.
We need to expand the opportunity for more students to earn a UC degree — but that alone is not the end goal. A great education — and then a great career — is the goal.
We need to help more Californians see a UC education as both attainable and transformative. One way we can do this is through initiatives like our Transfer Pathways and Transfer Admissions Guarantee, which provide greater clarity and help community college students prepare to transfer to UC.
Providing transfer opportunities has long been an essential element of California’s renowned higher education system, but we still have more work to do on this front. Expanding access is not just about the opportunity for more students to get into UC — it’s about getting graduates to stay connected with UC: building lifelong relationships between our institutions and our students. Lifelong learning used to be discussed as a desirable but vague pursuit. Like a hobby. Today, it is an imperative.
No four-year college degree can fully prepare someone for a 40- or 50-year career — especially in a world changing as fast as ours. As our graduates need to learn and retool and reskill throughout their careers, I want them to look to their alma mater. They should be able to rely on UC to provide high-quality, relevant, easily accessible education for life. It’s not a one-time purchase; it’s a lifetime subscription.
At the same time, that lifelong pursuit of learning must be affordable. One way we advance this at UC today is through the Tuition Stability Plan, a model where students know that the tuition rate they pay when they start their education will remain the same throughout their time at UC.
Affordability, of course, extends beyond tuition and fees. For many students and families, the real challenge lies in the broader costs of attendance — housing, food, transportation, health care, and other expenses universities have less control over and that continue to rise. We need to further strengthen our financial aid program and support for basic needs initiatives to ensure that a UC education remains within reach for all Californians.
Much of what we do will be transformed, advanced, disrupted — choose your verb — by rapidly changing information technology. I believe it will provide dramatic ways to expand our reach and lower costs. UC needs to lead this work.
At a time when confidence in higher education is being tested, our response cannot simply be to defend what we have done in the past. Some practices are worth preserving, but we can’t afford to stand completely still. We must demonstrate how excellence and access go hand-in-hand; ensure that a UC education is attainable and affordable; support students’ lifelong learning throughout their careers; and take advantage of all the tools available to us to advance this mission. In this way, we will reaffirm why the University of California matters so deeply to this state, the country, and the world — and why it’s worth the investment and support of people everywhere.
