Silicon Valley CEOs Advocate Stable Funding for California Higher Ed

Governor Brown asked a group of Silicon Valley CEOs for suggestions as to how to stimulate employment growth in California. Among their suggestions:

Develop a reliable and equitable financing and fee structure for state institutions of higher education and strengthen the buying power of the Cal Grant program for both public and private universities to encourage graduate and undergraduate student development.

You can find the complete document at http://svlg.org/docs/whitepaper_govbrown.docx

Note that the opening statement in the document that California did not create jobs during the past decade is misleading. Below is a graph of California nonfarm payroll employment I pulled from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As the graph shows, there was employment expansion in California until the Great Recession hit, undoing past job creation. Nonetheless, Silicon Valley types are likely to carry disproportionate weight with the governor. In his previous incarnation as governor, Brown particularly liked “technology” and gave money to UC-Berkeley for a high-tech electronics lab. (Yours truly was involved in that episode.)