US: California cuts 'imperil culture of innovation'

16 January 2011

California's culture of innovation, which propelled the growth of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, was built on a public higher-education system that spawned 56 Nobel Prize winners and is home to one campus that produces 1,000 engineers a year, writes Oliver Staley for Bloomberg. Now, Governor Jerry Brown's proposed 16% cut in the higher education budget means that the elite University of California system may no longer be able to guarantee admission to the top 12.5% of the state's high school seniors.

Annual tuition for residents, which was less than $4,500 a decade ago, is scheduled to rise to at least $11,124 in the next school year.

As the state struggles to overcome a $25.4 billion deficit, the $1.4 billion cuts in higher education imperil the ability to create the next generation of jobs and the tax base to meet government costs, said Robert Ackerman, founder and managing director of Palo Alto, California-based Allegis Capital.
Full report on the Bloomberg site

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