Don’t you love it when a politician says something honest?

I don’t mean to take the governor out of context. Read the report by Ry Rivard of Inside Higher Ed.

The New Normal at Berkeley

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.

“When UC campuses like Berkeley started to be particularly selective and hard to get into, campus officials worried that a Stephen Bechtel or a Earl Warren (both not stellar high school students) never would have gotten in,” said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. Bechtel went on to found the construction and engineering company that bears his name, and Warren was California governor and U.S. Supreme Court justice.