March 13, 2000
UC president outlines role for higher education in sustaining California's prosperity in next decade
By Trey Davis
Some 700,000 additional students will enroll at California's colleges and universities
in the next decade, placing enormous demands on the institutions that have helped
fuel the state's recent prosperity, University of California President Richard C.
Atkinson said on March 8.
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| President Richard C. Atkinson |
Atkinson said that California's booming "new economy" owes much of its success to the innovations that flow from research universities, and those institutions will continue to occupy center stage in the years to come.
"The California of the 21st century is headed for change. It's going to be bigger, more diverse, and more dependent on the creation of knowledge to keep its economy productive. The University of California is critical to our society's ability to ensure that the forces of demographics, intellectual discovery, and economic productivity work in its favor and not against it," he said.
Student enrollment is growing as California's diverse population and prosperous economy grow.
In the 1950s and 1960s, an original "Tidal Wave" of students hit California as the baby-boom generation entered the state's colleges and universities. "Tidal Wave II" is emerging as the children of those baby boomers are expected to attend California's university and college campuses within the next decade.
By 2010, the University of California's general-campus enrollment will grow approximately 40 percent to 210,000 students, matching UC's total enrollment growth over the past 30 years. At the same time, the university must also hire 3,000 additional faculty.
To accommodate its share of the coming surge of students and to ensure a diverse student body, Atkinson outlined a number of strategies, including:
- The opening of UC Merced, the system's tenth campus.
- Regular-session growth at established campuses.
- Expanded summer sessions.
- Expanded UC programs using off-campus centers, Education Abroad, and distance
learning.
- Initiatives to improve K-12 education and encourage outstanding teaching, such as the Reading and Algebra Institutes, the Principal Leadership Institutes, and Subject Matters Projects, which Atkinson views as the "guarantee of long-term progress" in increasing diversity on UC campuses.
Turning his attention to the role of intellectual discovery and its implications
for economic growth, Atkinson noted that UC's research in agriculture, biomedical
technologies, computer and information sciences, and other fields has played a major
role in California's current record prosperity.
"We have made a deliberate effort at UC to improve technology transfer and work
more closely with industry to transform basic research into useful products,"
Atkinson said.
As a measure of technology transfer, UC generates more patents than any other U.S.
university. Furthermore, UC's Industry-University Cooperative Research program has
invested more than $100 million in the past three years for new research, including
the BioSTAR project and the Digital Media Innovation Program, which will keep California
at the forefront of the highly competitive biotechnology and multimedia industries.
These efforts will be complemented by the governor's proposed Institutes for Science
and Innovation and support for expanded science and engineering enrollments in the
coming decade.
"These research partnerships are an appropriate and productive extension of
our land-grant mission," Atkinson said. "At the same time, the University
of California offers one of the best educations, undergraduate and graduate, available
anywhere.
"California is entering the new century with a booming economy. This gives us
a tremendous strategic advantage in dealing with the powerful demographic and economic
forces ahead of us," Atkinson concluded. "We have the opportunity to make
the next decade one of the most productive ever, not just for higher education but
for California."
