(11-29-2017 01:26 AM)Stugray2 Wrote: The way to think of it is California has a tier 1-A+ system and a tier 3 system, with no tier 2. It's a long standing feature of California politics, which is not really party related. What it means is any overly ambitious CSU President will find their wings clipped fast, and their school unable to take advantage of the opportunities all around them. I marvel at how SDSU has pushed the envelope as far as they have.
I would amend this. It is 3 tier.
Tier 1 is Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD. It's A+ but it's small for the state - it would be the same as if the University of Michigan had 23,000 undergrads, or if Utah had 8,000 undergrads.
Tier 2 are the other 7 campuses of the UC system. It's about the 80% of the size, proportionally, as Michigan State or NC State are in their states, but on average is lower quality (the better ones are as good as MSU or NCSU, but then there's Riverside and Merced).
Tier 3 is the CSU system. It's got 2 high quality masters-level schools that could compete with doctoral schools in other states (Cal Poly and SDSU), a bunch of adequate masters-level schools, and a bunch that are on the level of Wright State or the HBCUs. At 478,000 students, if you put it in Michigan it would be the size and quality of Michigan's 6 public master's universities plus WMU and CMU.
Of course, Michigan also has Wayne State, Oakland, Eastern Michigan, and Michigan Tech (which educate a total of 75,000 students and perform $300 million in research annually).
Michigan is not unique - I could do the same thing for any Midwestern state (and most Southeastern ones) to show that California's system is not even close to adequate.