NINE of the ten campuses of the University of California—led by Berkeley—once again made it into an annual ranking of the world's leading universities, published last month by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. All's well in Californian higher education, it might seem.

But that is not what Pat Brown or Clark Kerr would say, were they alive today. They were, respectively, governor of the state and president of the University of California (UC) in 1960, when California adopted a “master plan” that became an international model. Their aim was not only to have excellent public universities, but to give the state's population nearly universal and free access to them. Some pupils would enter so-called community colleges for a two-year vocational programme, others one of the (now 23) campuses of the California State University (CSU), and the best might go to a UC campus.

In order to assure access for all, tuition charges were banned—only “fees” for some costs other than education were allowed. Most funding was to come from taxpayers. The premise was that higher education was a public good for the state, which was nursing its own future entrepreneurs and taxpayers. As Mr Kerr put it, the universities were “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour”.

That consensus has been upended. In 1990 the state paid 78% of the cost of educating each student. That ratio dropped to 47% last year, and will fall even more during the current academic year, after the latest round of budget cuts, overseen by Jerry Brown, the current governor and son of Pat Brown. In some ways, California has now inverted the priorities of the older Brown's era. Spending on prisons passed spending on universities in around 2004.

This has led to concerns that the public universities might lose their excellence. It takes money to attract the best professors, and the best students follow them. An alternative to worse public universities, however, is quasi-privatised ones. That seems to be the route taken in California.