Commentary: California’s public universities come through – at least for one family (EdSource)

I confess that when my daughter enrolled as a freshman four years ago, I worried about the quality of the education she would receive — simply because of the huge numbers of students most UC and CSU campuses have had to take on. I had the same concerns when my son enrolled at UC Irvine a few years earlier.

I need not have worried.

At a celebratory dinner a few hours after her graduation ceremony, I asked my daughter to name the worst class she had taken — and the best. She easily remembered the worst one, but then, with equal facility, named four courses — psychopharmacology, psychopathology, population health, and the history of architecture in the U.S. — she said were outstanding ones. She enthusiastically described each of them, including the professors who taught them. It was exhilarating to see a young person, and my daughter no less, so excited about learning and scholarship.

My son had a similar experience at UC Irvine, where he majored in data science, and then, partially as a result of the pandemic, stayed for an extra year to get his master’s degree in statistics. He now has a job at Google. Both of them say they got a high-quality education on their campuses. This was achieved despite the huge increases in enrollment in recent decades.

Read the full article in EdSource.