Not to be obtuse, but I still don't quite follow. By "state and city colleges," you mean public institutions outside the UC system? (I realize the distinction you're drawing might be obvious to Californians, but it isn't to me!) Joseph Catron
--------------
Dennis and Joanna explained some of the differences. But there are more. The community college system is supposed to be a catch-all system. They offer transfer curriculum to four year schools. They also act as education for vocational training for trade unions in carpentry, plumbing, electricians, and para-professions like EMT's and entry level fire and police.
The state college systems does very similar duty to the next higher tier of professions like nursing, para-legal, primary and secondary teachers, engineering, architecture, computer programming, etc.
The highest level the UC system is intended for the top tier professions in law, medicine, teaching, engineering, and most especially research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
This tiered system was part of Brown's Master Plan in 1960, as Dennis mentioned.
The great importance of integrating this entire system with women, minority and low income students was to use this education system to integrate all the trades and professions. That was the basic plan behind the OE war on poverty program where I worked. The end point was economic, because these trades and professions were where the most and the best paying jobs were.
This whole political project was starting to work, but was systemically resisted by the higher education establishment. A key example of resistance was the Regent of UC v. Bakke, which struck down affirmative action in the med school application process, 1978.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke
This decision didn't just effect the med school, but was system wide and across all departments.
The political impact was to cut off access to the top tier professions. It was already a pitched battle to get these professions to open up after admission, using everything we had. The latter was part of my master plan, going after the Graduate Division Letters and Science. The basic idea was to open the whole application process so that more women and minorities were accepted in advanced degree programs. The idea came from the first staff in the project who were all grad students during the 60s. There was a more informal integration system in depts like Philosophy, Sociology, and City Planning, and to some degree in Architecture.
But even in those department, the subtlies of merit/reward, class/difference were just awesome to consider. Take philosophy. Where do you suppose women/minority students went? Analytic, inductive theory, and science? Hell no. They went for the so-called soft core: continental, social, linguistic, and everything but analytics. The remarkably simple answer was analytics uses mathematics as an intellectual tool of intimidation and discrimination.
A very similar intellectual dynamics went on in Sociology and City Planning. The part of sociology that deals with statistics and probability is probably the least likely to find women and minorities. Instead they end up in the soft core of various minority and ethnic social ideas and steer clear of the number crunching. In City Planning, one of the chief feeder systems is undergrad civil engineering, where building codes and inspection are the primary trades. Guess how many black, latino, or asian women for that matter have civil engineering degrees?
I have dated, loved, married, and gone out with women from the professional caste. They almost to a person, tell the same story. There is a cultural-class-gender system at work, but I can't put my finger on its internal dynamics. I could simplify it down to girls and mathematics. My ex started out in Chemistry and jumped to Cultural Anthropology. Another long ago date, post marriage, started in Architecture and then moved to Landscape Architecture. M was in a constant battle with the chief architect partners at several firms over her position in Landscape. Only men were doing the heavy lifing CAD-brain work. This is just nonsense if you have ever really gotten into the reproduction of a landscape as a model ecology.
My math teacher buddy called tonight. So I asked him. What is the break down with girls and algebra? He read off his class roster. Here are the results. Top 10 students, 5 girls, 5 boys. Top 5 students, 4 girls, 1 boy. Top 30 students, 13 girls, 18 boys. So the conclusion and current teacher wisdom was that boys mature later, and then excel in first and second year college level math. Right or wrong, I can't help thinking this is a cultural and not biological artifact.
But there are a lot sociological and cultural systems at work, which I don't understand, because UCB was overhauled by some minority students, but not others. (Think asian v. black.) So UC can claim `diversity', but this claim is mostly false, once you get beyond the ethnic/gender numbers.
I could see the culture-class system operate among disabled students in the following way. The disabled students who did the best in academics were usually also the best off in economic terms, had the most support of their families and had the easiest time. Students from middle class and working class families did the worst and showed the signs of most disaffection, discontent, alienation, etc. (I think of these as promise of radicalization.) These income groups were also most likely to institutionalize their disabled children, again no doubt for economic reasons. Disable kids are very expensive to raise and will drive you broke if there is no public support safety net.
This economic effect transfers over to women and minorities where family income is the best outcome predictor. This works like a self re-enfocing cycle.
We need socio-economic interventions to break the cycles. The critical question is which ones among our palette?
CG