But that is not what Pat Brown or Clark Kerr would say, were they alive today. They were, respectively, governor of the state and president of the University of California (UC) in 1960, when California adopted a “master plan” that became an international model. Their aim was not only to have excellent public universities, but to give the state’s population nearly universal and free access to them. Some pupils would enter so-called community colleges for a two-year vocational programme, others one of the (now 23) campuses of the California State University (CSU), and the best might go to a UC campus.

In order to assure access for all, tuition charges were banned—only “fees” for some costs other than education were allowed. Most funding was to come from taxpayers. The premise was that higher education was a public good for the state, which was nursing its own future entrepreneurs and taxpayers. As Mr Kerr put it, the universities were “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour”.

This has led to concerns that the public universities might lose their excellence. It takes money to attract the best professors, and the best students follow them. An alternative to worse public universities, however, is quasi-privatised ones. That seems to be the route taken in California.

Thus students will this year, for the first time, pay more for tuition than the state gives in funding. This follows years of tuition fee increases far steeper than the average at American public universities (see chart). A place at a UC campus can easily now cost $13,000, or $31,000 including housing given California’s high costs.

To raise other revenues, the various campuses also admit ever more out-of-state students (who pay three times more) and target rich alumni for more donations. Led by the business and law schools, they behave increasingly like private universities, in other words. This strategy retains pockets of excellence. But it also runs counter to the philosophy of the master plan, by pricing ever more Californian families out of a place. The state now ranks 41st in the number of college degrees awarded for every 100 of its high school graduates.

Clark Kerr’s logic is thus being reversed, as the universities produce fewer Californian company founders, inventors and taxpayers. The Public Policy Institute of California, a think-tank, reckons that the state’s industry will face a shortage of 1m graduates by 2025. Employers will surely take note.