It is time for an 11th University of California campus: a cyber-campus devoted to awarding online degrees to UC-eligible students.
No budgetary alchemy will allow us to educate the state's future university students in the same way we do now but with less money. The budget cuts caused by the state economic crisis are real and huge, leaving two choices. Educators can do less with less, or we can explore new ways of providing value to California and the nation by doing more -- albeit differently -- with less.
UC XI would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and "anytime" options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system. Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors and adjunct faculty.
We have the social networking technologies to support student interactions with instructors and each other. Science laboratories could be provided on weekends, at night or during summers, and not exclusively on UC campuses. The faculty can develop powerful academic controls to guarantee UC-caliber instruction and learning.
There are examples of failure in online instruction, but none involved degree-granting instruction by a premier institution with the kind of market appeal that UC campuses enjoy not just in Barstow but in Bangor and Beijing. Moreover, there are some important success stories. Britain's government-funded Open University, begun 40 years ago, offers some lectures in partnership with the BBC. It claims 5% of Britain's adult population has taken at least one of its courses, and it ranks second in student satisfaction out of 258 British institutions, with high marks from government inspectors too. Closer to home, many talented Californians opt for the pricier online University of Phoenix over our public four-year campuses, presumably for convenience and schedules -- or because of our shortage of seats.
Five years ago, when I became dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, I worried that California leaders were no longer committed to having a world-class university, especially law schools. Nowhere is it decreed that a state must challenge the best private universities, though California was proudly unique in that regard. But a generation of stingy state investment suggests that the goal of "world-class K-16 education for all" has become, simply, "better than Mississippi."
