Californians worried about rising cost of college

Daniel Weintraub
Sacbee.com
Nov 1, 2007

Californians place a higher value on a college education than do Americans from other states, but many also have a sense that their children will not be accepted to a university or be able to afford it even if they are invited to enroll, according to a new statewide survey to be released today.

The poll, by the Public Policy Institute of California, reveals an angst among the state's adults, who believe that higher education is a key to personal wellbeing and the state's economy but say that getting a college education is more difficult than it was ten years ago.

The good news is that at least some of those fears might be misplaced.

While the cost of a college education has been steadily increasing, state data show that California high school graduates are attending public colleges or universities here in record numbers and at rates about equal to a decade ago.

"There is a real disconnect here," said Mark Baldassare, president of the policy institute and director of the poll. "Parents overwhelmingly think college is necessary for success, want their own child to go to college, are clearly worried about being able to afford college, yet don't – or can't – save at the rate they think they should." The survey, based on interviews with 2,503 California adults between Oct. 10 and Oct. 23, has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Californians, the poll found, believe more in the value of higher education than do Americans elsewhere. Here, 64 percent of adults say college is "necessary for a person to be successful in today's work world," while 34 percent agreed that "there are many ways to succeed" without a college education. A survey conducted earlier this year by Public Agenda, Baldassare said, found that adults nationwide were evenly divided on the same question, with 50 percent saying a college education was necessary to succeed and 49 percent saying it was not.

One factor driving California's numbers up appears to be the state's ethnic diversity, because minorities are more inclined than whites to see higher education as the route to success. Latinos rated a college education the highest, with 79 percent saying it was necessary to succeed. Asians were next at 72 percent, followed by blacks at 68 percent and whites at 55 percent. Immigrants were more likely than native-born Americans to value higher education, with 81 percent of foreign-born adults saying a college education was necessary and 57 percent of U.S.-born adults making that assessment.

But Californians are also worried about the increasing cost of higher education and what that means about the opportunity of qualified students to attend college.

Only one in three adults said they thought the "vast majority" of qualified students had the opportunity to move on, while 65 percent said they did not. Sixty-six percent said they thought the price of college kept qualified and motivated students from attending. Fifty-six percent of adults believe that getting a college education is more difficult than it was 10 years ago, and 75 percent of parents are at least somewhat worried about being able to afford college for their youngest child.

Those concerns no doubt reflect what Californians know about the rising cost of attending college here. Since 1990, the cost of tuition and fees at the University of California and the California State University system has climbed by 350 percent, while the general cost of living has increased during that time by 44 percent and personal income in California has grown 70 percent.

Despite those higher costs, however, California high school graduates continue to move on to college in large numbers. Since 1996, the number of Californians attending higher education has increased by a quarter-million, to about 2.4 million altogether.

According to the California Postsecondary Education Commission, about 47 percent of the state's high school graduates enrolled in a California public university or college in 2006, compared with 48.5 percent in 1996. That number dipped in the late 1990s, when the booming economy increased opportunities outside of college and the passage of Proposition 209, which banned racial and gender preferences in higher education, was blamed for pushing minority applicants to other states. But the participation rate bottomed out at 42.5 percent of high school graduates in 2003 and has been climbing since.

Participation rates for Latinos are about the same as they were 10 years ago, with 44 percent of Latino high school graduates going on to a California college or university, even as the raw number of Latino graduates has soared. For blacks, meanwhile, about 48 percent of graduates attended college in 2006, and for Asian-Americans the rate was about 69 percent. The only major ethnic group to see a significant drop in its college-going rate since 1996 was whites, with 41 percent of high school graduates going on to a California school in 2006 compared with 45 percent 10 years ago and 51 percent in 1986.

The bottom line: Californians value higher education and are understandably concerned about its accessibility. But the reality might not be as bad as they fear.