Description

California's abiltiy to preserve current levels of access to its system of higher education is threatened by increasing enrollments, pressures on the state budgets, and the increasing costs of higher education. This study addresses the conditions under which California can preserve access over the next two decades. The study uses a new approach to decision making under uncertainty, called exploratory modeling, that combines traditional quantitative forecasting techniques with insights from scenario planning. This new approach provides visual representations, called landscapes of plausible futures, of the many scenarios facing California higher education, so that decision makers and stakeholders can better understand the assumptions underlying various positions in the political debate and which trends are most salient to decision makers' choices.