Sun
Danchen Sun
Eng 110
1 March 2015
How will the California Dream of Higher Education Goes?
Since the 1864 Golden Rush in California, the name of “California” has been considered
as a dreamland, where people have more opportunities to success if contributing enough
efforts. In 1960, by the establishment of “the California Master Plan for Higher Education”, a
coherent higher education system that closely connects UC, CSU, and CC primarily create a
paradise for American students to dream of. However, not only for American students,
California higher educational dream has also penetrated into international students’ minds.
Every year, in order to approach dreamed educations, streams of students coming from out-
of-states leave anything behind and pays expensive tuition. Despite the ourishing
appearance of California higher educational dream, a large number of
students have been blocked by the slowly corrupted core of the dream,
including long-lasting increase of tuition and reappearing discrimination.
To some extent, the prosperous California dream for postsecondary education has turned
to ashes due to the “unaffordable” tuition. The dramatically increasing tuition has blocked a
group of students to achieve their current California dream —- being admitted by the
universities they dreamed of. The tuition of UC and Cal States schools grows both at a rapid
rate in the recent five years. In addition, according to the article “Brown, Legislature study
ways to avoid UC, Cal State tuition hikes”, over the next five years, the tuition is going to
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add another 28% of present tuition in the UC campuses, which resulted from the US regent
voting (Marson, Macgreevy and Gordon, par.7). Back into 1960, in terms of “the California
Master Plan for Higher Education”, the high school graduates who are in the top 12.5% will
be guaranteed to get into UC without paying tuition. It can be said that California was the
place where students could realize their dreams by them. The only standard that decided
whether a high school graduate would be admitted by UC and CSU was the abilities and
characters of the student, whereas the climbing tuition in the recent years has smashed
feasible dreams of students with financial burden. Whether the UC and CSU tuition is
affordable for a family has became the overwhelming aspect for an outstanding high school
graduate to make his dream come true. For example, in the example that is mentioned by
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