The Price of Cost Containment: A Critical Policy Analysis of the California Master Plan

• In Event: Reckoning with the Impact of Policy to Understand the Present

Abstract

The California Master Plan remains one of the most enduring and influential higher education policies of the post-World War II era. Yet, six decades after its passage, the Master Plan continues to serve as the normative legitimation for a deeply inequitable racially and socioeconomically stratified public higher education system. Exploring this contradiction, we conduct a critical policy history applying Ball’s (1993) three-part critical policy sociology framework of policy text, discourse, and effect. We show that the Master Plan was driven primarily by cost-control rather than educational imperatives, and trace to the Master Plan the institutionalization of cost-effectiveness as the norm upholding gender, racial, and class privilege within public higher education in California.

Authors

• David O'Brien, California State University - Sacramento

• Amal Kumar, California State University - Sacramento