Zombie Attacks

Last week offered more examples of Sacramento Politicians following the latest fashionable thinking on Higher Education.

For those of you who missed it, Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his SB520.  It tends to soften the language of command and the nature of the targets.  But its essential nature--to provide legitimacy for for-profit online providers while ignoring questions of curricular improvements--remain in place.  You can find the bill here.

Also last week the Governor's office released a framework for Higher Education funding that I suppose will be elaborated in his May Revise on the State Budget.  As you can see it pats the Governor on the back for promising to increase Higher Education funding back to where it was 6 years ago while imposing a tuition freeze and a series of quantitative metrics on the three higher ed segments.  It confuses price with cost and doesn't seem to realize that instructional costs have been reduced and the driver for tuition increases has been the reduction in state funding.  We have posted the framework here.

We will try to be back with fuller analysis when we can.  Bob Samuels does have analysis here while Dan Mitchell has some thoughts on the May Revise here.