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Study: California's higher education deteriorating
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-01-08 11:39

LOS ANGELES -- California, once regarded as a leader in the United States for its public higher education system, is quickly dropping in the rankings, said a report released Wednesday.

California ranks next to the last in the US for its number of adults with at least a high school diploma, according to the report, titled "California at the Edge of a Cliff," released by the California Faculty Association.

Meanwhile, the state's investment in public higher education has dropped over the past three decades, and now ranks 22nd in the country. That's despite having the country's largest public higher education system, the report said.

"It's a collapse," said Thomas Mortenson, author of the report, who is an independent analyst living in Iowa and a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, D.C.

Ranking 49th out of 50 states is an indication of the state's deteriorating educational status in recent decades, Mortenson said in the report.

As of 2007, California ranked 14th in the United States in terms of college educated members of the workforce over 25 years of age, a drop from eighth place in 1981, the report showed.

Mortenson said that California has been slipping toward educational and economic mediocrity while other states have made greater gains in building a college-educated workforce.

The California Faculty Association is using the report's findings to blast Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed funding cuts for education.

Grappling with a 14.8-billion-dollar state budget deficit, Schwarzenegger has proposed a combination of sales tax increases, borrowing and major budget cuts, including trimming billions of dollars from the state's education budget.