It's been 20 years since Patrick Callan, maybe our most thoughtful analyst of higher education policy, observed that just as waves of poor and minority students were nearing college age, the proportion of state budgets allocated to college and university support was going down. The decline has only gotten steeper in the years since.

In California, as in many other states, that may be more than coincidence. It's not conscious racism – not in the majority of cases anyway. But it raises the first of a series of disturbing questions about what Callan calls our dysfunctional higher education system.

How much do the changing demographics of our student populations, both in K-12 and higher education, dampen the willingness of voters, most of whom are older, whiter and more affluent, to pay for schools and colleges in which non-Hispanic whites are now a shrinking minority and a growing percentage are immigrants or their children? A half-century ago, when our three-tier higher education system and the state's master plan guaranteed every student who could benefit a place at little or no tuition, we were a model for the world.

But that was when most California students were, or easily could be, the children of voters who paid the taxes.

In 1976, 67 percent of University of California students were non-Hispanic whites; in 2010, whites were down to 33 percent. In 1976, 4 percent were Latinos; in 2010, without affirmative action, 15 percent were Latinos. In the same generation, the percentage of Asians at UC had more than quadrupled, from 7 percent to 30 percent.

More dramatically still, in the state's huge community college system, ethnic minorities dominate the enrollment: Of its 1.7 million students, 549,000, less than a third, are non-Hispanic whites; 575,000 are Latinos and 189,000 are Asians.

Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, among others, has shown that the more ethnically diverse a society becomes, the more reluctant voters are to support generous public services. Every journalist who writes about budget cuts in education hears from those who say they'll be damned if they'll pay another cent in taxes for schools full of "Mexicans."

But underfunding isn't the whole story of a national education system, once first in the world in educating its citizenry, now overtaken by a dozen other countries. As for California, while other states are trying to eliminate redundant programs and exploiting new technologies, this state seems to be perennially locked into outdated models.

Completion and transfer rates at the community colleges are fearfully low, in part because state financing policies reward the two-year colleges on the basis of attendance, not for success. Meanwhile, the universities, the University of California especially, resist the creation, as other states are doing, of common lower division courses with the community colleges to smooth the path for transfers. Callan describes UC, in effect, as innovation-phobic.

And because the California Master Plan for Higher Education, which divided the turf between the three segments of the system, was seen as such a success in the years after its adoption in 1960, the state is still locked into its three separate educational silos.

Similarly, as Callan says, Californians fervently believe that there can be no educational excellence except at research universities like UC Berkeley. That's unsustainable in the present fiscal environment. The system's world-class programs, he says, "conceal a lot of mediocrity." Equally irrational is that even as budget cuts force the community colleges to reduce course offerings, and thus reduce access, and as the universities jack up tuition, the two-year colleges charge the lowest fees in the nation. The $36 a unit, or $1,080 a year, is about half the national average.

Because low-income students get tuition waivers, even $60 a unit, which is what the state legislative analyst recommends, wouldn't have any impact on struggling students. But it would make many eligible for federal financial aid and tax breaks.

It would also provide enough revenue to enable the community colleges to restore many of the courses they've been cutting. The system, as Nancy Shulock and her colleagues at Sacramento State point out, is badly funded not because state support is so low, but because tuition is.

Callan, for many years the president of the Center for Higher Education and Public Policy, couldn't have predicted in 1991 how much higher tuition would go and how much more the state's share of higher education funding would shrink.

But he's long been prescient in his criticism of a system that, he says, was underperforming the country, both in access and in completion rates, long before the current economic slump. And as the nation's most educated generation – the baby boomers – begin to retire, who will be able to replace them? A half-century ago, California led the nation toward greater opportunity and higher standards. Are we now leading it down?

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Peter Schrag, a retired editorial page editor of The Bee, writes on California issues.

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