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California has a rich tradition of academic and research excellence. By the late twentieth century, the state had established itself as one of the top academic centers in the world. California is home to an enormous public education system with 9,231 schools (443 of them charter schools) in 1,001 districts enrolling 6.2 million students. Nine percent of California students attend the state’s 3,751 private schools. The state’s 1999 Public Schools Accountability Act established a student performance improvement accountability system including Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR), a high school exit exam, and a means for measuring progress. Results show test scores are improving each year. Student achievement is on par with national accomplishments; combined SAT scores averaged 1020 for California students, just below the national average of 1026 in 2004. The state’s high-school dropout rate was 3.3% for 2004.
Historically, local property taxes have been the main source of California’s public school funding, which caused a disparity between wealthy and poorer districts. The state’s reputation for educational distinction suffered with the solution to place a cap on spending to equalize funding across districts, which resulted in lowering spending for affluent communities rather than raising it for poorer ones. The state has one of the lowest rankings (44th) for per capita income spending on education in the country. Today's funding is based on revenue limits for each student set in the 1970s plus inflation ($6,659 on average per student compared to $7,734 nationally in 2002), rather than reflecting the current needs of the districts. In response, parents in many districts privately raise funds and form tax-exempt foundations to offset revenue limits.
250 colleges and universities enroll 2.3 million students in California, graduating 160,000 every year. The California State University (CSU) system is made up of 23 campuses educating 400,000 students each year. San Jose State University, founded in 1857, was the state’s first institution of public higher education. The University of California (UC) enrolls 210,000 students annually across 10 campuses. Impressively, one third of the biotechnology firms in the state (and one in six nationwide) were founded by UC scientists. Berkeley and UCLA rank among the leading universities of the world. Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey are the other two public education institutions in California. There are also 77 private colleges and universities in the state. Renowned private universities include Stanford University and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Additionally, the Golden State is home to 110 community colleges enrolling over 1.6 million students every year.
Many of the state’s colleges have developed into research universities. The University of California Biotechnology Research and Education Program (UC BREP), embodying 10 campuses and three national laboratories, is dedicated to fostering leading-edge biotechnology research, innovative training programs, and acting as a resource on all aspects in the field. The Sciences Research & Development Division at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego supports natural sciences researchers, meeting their cyberinfrastructure needs by creating and developing the tools necessary for discovery. Berkeley’s Graduate Program in Computational and Genomic Biology endeavors to develop new technologies to handle genomic information while utilizing them to solve biomedical problems.
Several schools offer interdisciplinary programs in the life sciences, including the California Institute of Technology’s Bioengineering Program, UC Irvine’s Graduate Program in Molecular Biology, Genetics & Biochemistry (MBGB), UCSD's Interdisciplinary Bioinformatics Program, and UCSF's Biological and Medical Informatics Graduate Program, to name a few.
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