California Governor Jerry Brown this week said the state's flagship -- the University of California at Berkeley -- has closed its doors to "normal" people.
The remark, one of Brown's characteristically blunt assertions, taps into years of concern that the state’s most prestigious universities are increasingly out of reach for many Californians.
Brown said that back in his day (he entered Berkeley in 1960) he and his two sisters could get into the University of California at Berkeley without much worry. So could his nieces and grand-nieces. But things have changed at Berkeley, he said.
"It just feels that whatever used to belong to the normal people of California – assuming the Brown extended family is normal – it's not available anymore," Brown said during a Board of Regents meeting this week. "And so you got your foreign students and you got your 4.0 folks, but just the kind of ordinary, normal students, you know, that got good grades but weren't at the top of the heap there – they're getting frozen out." (It might not be fair to deem the Brown family "normal." Jerry Brown's father, Pat, was governor the year Jerry enrolled at Berkeley. And after Jerry Brown graduated, he attended Yale Law School.)
Brown said his offhand remarks were "purely anecdotal," but those anecdotes shape how he feels about the UC system.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/23/gov-brown-says-normal-californians-cant-get-berkeley-problem-some-californians-blame