California is oriented toward tax-supported public education. The two-year junior or community college was introduced in California in 1907, and there are now more than 100 such colleges. Four-year state colleges and the University of California system complete the public higher-education structure. The University Extension system operates throughout the state. More than one-tenth of California schoolchildren and a slightly higher percentage of college-age students attend private schools.

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According to a master plan that attempts to avoid overlapping roles in the complex system of public colleges and universities, the top one-third of high school graduates are eligible to enroll at one of the campuses of the University of California: Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, Riverside, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and San Diego. The campuses at Santa Cruz and San Diego were established on variations of the Oxford University system of numerous small independent colleges sharing limited central facilities or services. The original campus at Berkeley was founded in 1855 and has remained one of the most prestigious academic communities in the country. The California State University, with numerous branches—including Fresno State University; San Francisco State University; California State University, Fullerton; and California State University, Long Beach—also draws from among the top one-third of high school graduates. High school graduates from the lower two-thirds of their classes attend two-year colleges and often are able to transfer at the end of that period to one of the four-year campuses. California also has many prestigious private higher-educational institutions, among them Stanford University in Palo Alto, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Mills College in Oakland, the Claremont Colleges, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

The arts

San Francisco has produced such painters as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. Los Angeles has been more successful as a marketplace for art, with a thriving colony of galleries along La Cienega Boulevard. Carmel, Big Sur, Ojai, and Sausalito have harbored communities of practitioners of diverse arts.

Early writers associated with California came from outside the state: Bret Harte, born in New York; Mark Twain, in Missouri; Joaquin Miller, in Indiana; and Ambrose Bierce, in Ohio. But the San Francisco of the Gold Rush days provided an eager audience for their writing, as it did for theatre and music. There followed a line of writers who came as close to establishing a regional tradition as have artists in any medium. Jack London, chronicler of men amid frontier violence, was born in San Francisco. California-born Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair opposed the social ills of their times in a foreshadowing of the later work of John Steinbeck and, to a lesser degree, of William Saroyan, both of whom were also native Californians. The Scottish naturalist John Muir, the progenitor of a school of environmental writers, extolled the state’s natural wonders. Robinson Jeffers, who lived in California much of his life, was the state’s most renowned poet. Poets connected with the San Francisco Beat movement include Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, and William Everson. An influx of literary figures (both Americans and European expatriates) as screenwriters into Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s established little in the way of regional cultural tradition, and the California milieu became instead a favorite target of satire in such novels as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and in works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg, and Ross Macdonald, as well as in the hard-boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain.

The industry for which California has been most popularly known, however, is that of movies and television, centered in and around Hollywood. The pioneers of the motion-picture industry found southern California extremely well suited to their needs of maximum sunshine, mild temperatures, varied terrain, and a well-educated and diverse labour market.

Hollywood has long been viewed as the center of a movie industry with a worldwide market, especially in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, when real estate boomed and riches were extravagantly displayed. The studios were ill prepared, however, for the revolution that they faced as a result of competition with television beginning after World War II. Those working in the movie industry found that millions of Americans were staying home, preferring to watch anything on television rather than go out to the motion-picture house. At about the same time, a series of court decisions judged the major producing companies to be trusts in restraint of trade by virtue of the vertical integration that controlled not only the production of motion pictures but also their distribution and exhibition. Although new features, including wide-screen projection, richer color, new lenses, and stereophonic sound, were introduced, serious losses were suffered by the industry. Major studios began to sell their film backlogs and to sell or lease their facilities to television concerns. Some studios, such as Universal, became mammoth television producers. With a reorganization of the studio system in the 1990s and an increased concentration on export markets, Hollywood’s film industry had revived by the end of the 20th century.

The music industry, centered on Los Angeles, also has a huge presence in California, though its prominence is more recent than that of the film industry. Capitol Records, established in 1942, was the first major label in California, and in the 1950s independent labels such as Specialty and Modern played important roles in the development of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. But in the late 1940s, before California made its indelible mark on rock, Cool Jazz, also known as West Coast Jazz, gained prominence. In the 1960s, as the music industry was shifting from New York to Los Angeles, the Beach Boys established California’s first signature sound, beginning a long string of successful popular music produced in southern California that stretched from folk rock, country rock, and singer-songwriters to punk and gangsta rap. Also in the 1960s, San Francisco became the epicenter of psychedelic rock and Bakersfield, an important locus of country music.