In 2018, Democratic lawmakers in California created a new bureaucratic department, in part, to “close equity and achievement gaps” at higher education institutions in the state. Seven years later, a recent analysis from CalMatters, a California-focused news organization, has documented the program’s disappointing results, specifically for women.
Lawmakers in the California legislature created the California Education Learning Laboratory to improve educational programs and outcomes, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The group’s mission expresses a specific interest in “narrowing equity gaps.” Since its inception, the program has sought to transform teaching methods at colleges throughout the state. It has leveraged grants to incentivize universities and their faculty to adopt new teaching methods, many of which prioritize inclusivity for minorities. The “laboratory” has also worked to influence public education policy in favor of its founding goals, effectively using state (taxpayer) money to influence state policy. The organization initially received about $8 million per year.
According to the new report conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California for CalMatters, the demographic shift for women in STEM was small. Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute, conducted the analysis, which has yet to be published in full. He commented that “The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all.”
He compared data from the 2009-2010 school year at the state’s four-year colleges to more recent data from 2022-23. As CalMatters reported, “The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19 percent to about 25 percent in engineering and from nearly 16 percent to about 23 percent in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.”
“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson remarked. Even the Learning Lab’s director, Lark Park, admitted the shortcoming. “While I think women are faring better in college generally, I would be skeptical that we can say ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of achieving parity for women in STEM undergraduate degrees,” she said.
It’s worth acknowledging that the CalMatters summary of the report notes that the program faced funding cuts during the COVID years. While proponents of such programs might argue that this affected the initiative’s effectiveness, broader trends call into question the necessity of the program and its social justice agenda. A previous report from the lab acknowledged an increase in women seeking STEM degrees for years before the lab was ever created.
According to that 2019 paper, “Overall, the number of female, Latinx, and African American students enrolled in STEM fields in California’s segments of public higher education has grown considerably in the past decade…” It added that “the percentage of female, Latinx, and African American students majoring in STEM fields and earning STEM degrees is also growing; enrollment of female, Latinx, and African American students in STEM fields is, moreover, increasing at a faster rate than overall female and URM [underrepresented minority] enrollment.”
In another example of growth predating the program, the paper noted that “Between 2006-7 and 2016-17, the number of UC bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields awarded to women increased by 63 percent (from 5,655 to 9,243)…” These numbers also mirror several nationwide trends.
Despite these developments, the Learning Lab wanted more. As Park noted, her goal has been parity — another word for equality. The underwhelming program, which may be eliminated next year, exemplifies the ineffectiveness of government policy in shifting societal traits and trends.
For example, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, launched to combat childhood obesity, had little success. The famed DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program of the 1980s and 1990s, which nobly attempted to discourage children and teens from using drugs, similarly failed to produce its intended outcomes. Similar to the trend of women and minorities increasingly earning STEM degrees before California’s initiative, the US poverty rate was falling for two decades before President Lyndon Johnson initiated his big-spending “War on Poverty.”
The failures of government attempts to shift societal preferences and behavior span a variety of issues, but examples like these, including the California STEM fumble, also reflect another key issue: the paternalism and hubris of deciding what is best for millions of people.
Progressive and liberal sensibilities champion the autonomy and capabilities of women and other minorities. Yet, despite their presumably good intentions (and ineffective government-imposed outcomes), there is a fundamental contradiction in their belief that politicians and bureaucrats in the California state Capitol — or Congress at the national level — and the experts they enlist “know best.” It also rests on the faulty premise that politicians are inherently capable of molding society.
Further, there are numerous privately funded efforts to support increasing the number of female, minority, and low-income students in STEM. These include scholarships, mentoring programs, and extracurricular educational courses.
Their existence calls into question the value of a low-performing state-funded program at the expense of already overburdened taxpayers. If individuals and groups want to provide resources for educational programs and specific demographics in general, they should be free to do so, whether they are effective or not. To the contrary, no one should be forced to fund social engineering projects hatched by the politicians and bureaucrats, whether they work or not.
While these California lawmakers, bureaucrats, and academics may have meant well, their intentions could not guarantee corresponding outcomes. Even if they could have, the presumption that using the force of government should produce these outcomes highlights a fundamental hypocrisy in such centrally planned, collectivist approaches to engineering individual success.