The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education—that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past thirty years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California had fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it was about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he would pay $13,218. Everywhere you turned, the long-term future of the state was being sacrificed.
