State of the City Report

The Pat Brown Institute and Cal State LA have released its State of the City report for the City of LA. It includes a lot of information about the County, too.

The CSU system

     I'll have to print this out and give it a read.

     Cal State L.A. has been doing a horrible job of letting people know what we do and why we matter.  That's why it is that I often find out about things produced by my colleagues through sheer accident.  As another example, I learned that we had a global warming symposium by walking across a parking lot and seeing a sign directing attendees to their assigned parking.  If I had taken a different bus, I would not have walked across that particular parking lot, and I wouldn't have even known we had a conference.

     I also learned about another program just by reading the paper:  http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6664199

     There was another nice story on the system that appeared in the SGV Tribune just a few days ago.  But it was an AP story, so it wasn't available on the website and I have been unable to find it elsewhere.  It talked about the rising cost of attending both the UC and CSU systems.

     The California State Univesity system should be the ladder to the middle class for the tens of thousands of local high school graduates from our local schools.  Instead, the fees keep increasing, the course offerings keep shrinking, and this ladder is getting harder and harder for people to climb.  For example, today, fees to attend CSU as a full-time student top $1000/quarter.  That's about five times what I paid just twenty years ago, and over ten times what my older brothers and sisters paid when they first enrolled at CSULA, just a few years before me.

State of the City Report

Going to UC used to be FREE, and they were mandated to serve the top 12% of grads, not just the top 10% as they do today.

We're now getting less education, for fewer people. The public schools are down in the dumps (though many schools do well nationally).

Nowadays, we're not just outsourcing manufacturing, but intellectual work. Next thing, we'll have to outsource our economic growth, and after that, we will have to sell off the state.

State of the City Report

     That's exactly it.  UC and CSU were both "free," with only campus "fees" that used to be modest.  Now the fees are starting to look an awful lot like tuition.

     By the way, I went to the Subway on Fremont for lunch, today.  The campus across the street is called "The Alhambra."  As is often the case, there were a number of people with backpacks, scrubs, or ID badges from across the street.  The pedestrian bridge to the Alhambra campus gets a fair amount of traffic.  I'm sure it's nothing close to a majority of the business at the food places across the way, but it's something.  As noted in my previous post, adding the residential development adjacent to all those jobs, educational slots, and basic amenities might actually work.