Students worked with government clients, including the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Research Bureau and the Little Hoover Commission. They also worked with nonprofit clients, such as Price Charities, the Child Welfare Initiative, Community Health Councils Inc., the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, Smart Growth America and Consejo Consultivo del Agua.

Christopher Weare, research associate professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, who co-teaches the course, noted how the students applied a range of new methodologies to their projects, extending far beyond what they had learned in their formal coursework.

“What is particularly impressive about these practicum projects is understanding the breadth and flexibility of the students’ analytic capabilities when they’ve gone through this program,” he said. “It both stretches the students and shows their ability to do the analysis that’s most appropriate for any particular problem.”

The students credited both their clients and USC Price with giving them the space to operate as real-world professionals.

“My anticipation for the practicum in general was thinking that all clients were going to have a very hands-on approach,” said Catherine Omalev, whose student group examined public safety realignment for the Little Hoover Commission. “But that wasn’t the case with many of the projects, and that was a great thing — that definitely brought freedom and ownership to our project as well.”

Omalev and fellow students Aubrey Farkas, Carl Svensson and Kimberly Bailey evaluated Assembly Bill 109, the October 2011 legislation that shifted the responsibility of low-level offenders from California state prisons to county jails. The group discovered that counties received grants of varying sizes to accommodate the influx of inmates. However, the funding formula didn’t account for a county jail’s capacity, fiscal ability or level of support from community-based organizations.

Another group of students tackled an equally vexing social problem for the Child Welfare Initiative. Denesa Moore, Gwendolyn Forrest, Hanyu Xue and Lacy Kuester identified model practices and approaches to help the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services and other interested parties address barriers to foster youth employment.

“Foster youth fare worse than nonfoster youth peers across the board,” Moore said. “So they have lower high school graduation rates, higher unemployment rates, and higher arrest and incarceration rates. You see it all. This is why Child Welfare Initiative really asked us to do this — to try to mitigate the unemployment rate.”

At the request of the Congressional Research Service, another student group concentrated on a very different employment-related issue: policymaking about people’s retirement savings decisions.

Retirement savings plan participants face a daunting array of decisions.

“The first is whether or not to participate and, if they participate, how much to contribute to the plan and how to invest those contributions,” said Alice Ip, who worked with fellow students Beatrice Fuchs, Colleen McKinney, Orkun Erkus and Peter Thomas. “And finally, when they retire, they have to decide how they will withdraw the value of their account balance.”

Students give their practicum presentation at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. (USC Photo/Deirdre Flanagan)

In the face of such complexity and ambiguity, people often avoid making any decisions at all. So the group found that options such as targeted auto-enrollment in retirement savings plans can encourage better preparation for retirement.

Some of the students’ research is well on its way to being put into practice. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 9 asked a student group to study the reasons why many industrial facilities, such as auto wrecking yards and recycling plants, don’t obtain the proper storm water permits, which regulate the discharge of pollutants into bodies of water.

“The rate of nonfiling is still very high, at least 50 percent by most estimates,” said Oswin Chan, whose student group included Lisa Rakha Goldstein, Stephan Noori and Ying Jia Huang. “The regulatory environment provides little to no incentive for facilities to file.

The EPA suspected that excessive permitting fees might be the main disincentive to compliance, but the students discovered a much more complex situation. Given that there are no inspection programs focused on nonfilers and no immediate penalties for being unpermitted, there are no real negative consequences to being out-of-compliance. In contrast, compliance is expensive, inconvenient and even risky since it makes the permitted facility more likely to incur legal action by environmental groups.

Client David Smith shared these results at a national meeting of the water permitting branch chiefs.

“I was impressed by the students’ level of thinking on it,” Smith said.

“Policy analysis research is actually something we need help on, and this is a new way for us to get some of those needs filled,” he added. “And doing projects like this is a way for students to get their head in the door a little bit … it’s a win-win.”

Another win-win occurred when Price Charities asked a group to explore the issue of creating new park space in the San Diego neighborhood of City Heights.

“Our research showed that community engagement is really the driving force behind our parks,” said Ashley Downend, who collaborated with Alexandra Ferguson, Dominique Clark and Rachel Lipton.

The students also revealed the recreational, social, economic, environmental and aesthetic benefits of providing more park space. And when it came to recommending potential locations for a skate park, the students’ research actually validated some of the land acquisition decisions that Price Charities had already made.

“Their findings aligned with some of our thoughts of which corner we were looking at, so that was a good confirmation,” said Becky Modesto, director of university relations for Price Charities. “And the students were wonderful. Their presentation was really professional.”

Matthew Hervey, executive director of Price Charities, added, “From our perspective, doing everything we could to improve the experience of the student and the learning process was our focus. To get anything meaningful in addition to that was like whipped cream and a cherry on top.

“From the oral presentation, the slide presentation, we very much received quite a bit of information that is that whipped cream and cherry on top,” Hervey noted. “So there’s definitely a positive on both sides.”

In addition, through the experience of serving as real-life consultants, students not only acquired key lessons, but they also encountered difficult challenges from the professional world — for example, employees leave their jobs, organizational priorities shift and information isn’t always accessible.

“Part of the value of the practicum is that it does often emulate what happens in a career, which is that unexpected things happen, and one has to be able to adjust accordingly,” said Juliet Musso, Houston Flournoy Professor of State Government, who co-teaches the course. “The students were very professional and really hard-working and creative in the way that they adjusted to these kinds of challenges.”

The endowment was made in honor of the donor’s parents, a homemaker and field worker who didn’t have formal educations but strongly believed in the value of education and served as the driving force behind the donor’s success in receiving a Master of Social Work at USC.

The Mexican-American donor wanted to support social work in all its forms in the Latino community believing this population has powerful leadership potential.

“Education gifts like this provide Latinos with a way to find the voice to be heard,” the donor said. “If we can make a difference in the lives of individual Latinos, then collectively the total community benefits.”

The gift bolsters the school’s commitment to advancing scholarship that supports the well-being of Latinos and promotes informed policymaking. Additionally, it helps to attract and retain pre-eminent faculty, which in turn draws the best students.

Marilyn L. Flynn, dean of the School of Social Work, said the investment only strengthened the school’s already strong research profile supported by some of the nation’s most outstanding Latino and Mexican scholars, which number more than many other schools of social work. She also said she was exceptionally proud of the school’s Latino social work students, who comprise more than a third of its enrollment.

“We have been working for several years to endow a professorship that would symbolize that power of our scholarly and professional interests in the Latino community — and now we have it,” Flynn said. “We could not have asked for a more eagerly anticipated or deeply welcomed gift.”

Among the school’s current Latino research interests is the National Institute on Drug Abuse-sponsored Interdisciplinary Research Training Institute on Hispanic Drug Abuse, a 10-day program designed to support and advance the careers of graduate students and new investigators interested in pursuing drug abuse research, particularly for the Latino community, led by Avelardo Valdez, Charles Kaplan and Alice Cepeda.

The school also houses the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging, which advances research that enhances optimal aging of people in low-income communities. Its executive director, William Vega, is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine who has conducted community and clinical research projects on health, mental health and substance abuse throughout the United States and Latin America.

Some of the school’s other faculty have been working on significant research in the Latino community as well, including Associate Professor Maria Aranda, who recently received the California Elder Mental Health and Aging Coalition’s Older Adult Leadership and Advocacy Award at the California Association of Area Agencies on Aging Annual Meeting and Allied Conference for her efforts to improve the mental health and well-being of aging Latinos in the state. Aranda is perhaps best known for her work on problem-solving therapy as a treatment for depression with older and middle-aged Latinos.

Associate Professor Concepcion Barrio is working on a $1.4 million project to study why Latinos are often underrepresented in federally funded research and clinical trials. Barrio believes language and cultural issues may be partly to blame, particularly when researchers attempt to obtain consent from potential participants. She is partnering with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, to study the issue and develop an educational tool to improve overall research literacy among Latinos with schizophrenia.

In another effort to boost outcomes for ethnic minorities, Assistant Professor Erick Guerrero was recently awarded a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study how the Affordable Care Act will impact substance abuse treatment programs serving Latino and African-American clients.

Fifty-eight percent of Californians said they support the right for same-sex couples to marry, with 49 percent “strongly” in favor and 9 percent “not so strongly” in favor. Only 36 percent of voters said they oppose same-sex marriage in the state, with 30 percent “strongly” opposed and 6 percent “not so strongly” opposed.

Overall, support has climbed since a March 2010 USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll, which found 52 percent of Californians in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and 40 percent opposed.

Seniors in particular are shifting toward support of same-sex marriage, the poll found. Californians over the age of 65 are now evenly split on the matter, with 47 percent opposed and 46 percent for legalization — an 11-point jump in favor of same-sex marriage from the March 2010 poll, which found 53 percent of seniors opposed and 35 percent in favor.

According to the latest poll, voters age 18 to 29 show the highest levels of support for the issue, with 76-21 percent in favor.

“There’s been an assumption for four years that support for same-sex marriage is driven by demographics, and there’s no question that we see much stronger support among younger voters than older voters,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “But that level of support among older voters is extremely important. What the shift among older voters shows is that this isn’t just a generational change, but that a whole cohort of voters is actually changing their position on the issue.”

The poll also found support for the issue increasing across party lines. Democrats favor legalizing same-sex marriage by 70-24 percent, up from 63-31 percent support in the March 2010 poll. A majority of Republicans oppose by 58-35 percent, down from 62-28 percent in 2010. Decline-to-state voters support gay marriage by 62-32 percent, similar to the March 2010 poll, which showed 62-30 percent in favor.

Overall, the poll found that Californians support legalizing same-sex marriage in the state across racial lines: 61-34 percent of white voters, 58-30 percent of Asian voters, 51-44 percent of Latino voters and 50-39 percent of black voters are all in favor.

Split on proposal for transgender students

The USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll also surveyed voters on a proposal for California schools to allow transgender students to participate on sports teams and to use bathrooms that correspond with the gender they most identify with, not their sex at birth.

Californians were split on the proposal, with 46 percent opposed to the idea and 43 percent in favor. Of those respondents, 36 percent said they “strongly” opposed the proposal and 11 percent “somewhat” opposed it. In contrast, 24 percent “strongly” favored the proposal and 19 percent said they “somewhat” favored it.

Parents were more sharply divided on the issue. California voters with children opposed the proposal by 52-39 percent, while those without children favored it by 45-44 percent.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll was conducted on May 27 to June 2 by Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Republican polling firm American Viewpoint. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Additional poll results and methodology are available here.

Hadfield, a law and economics professor, told a special working group of the bar’s board of trustees that most Californians are locked out of the justice system because they can’t afford an attorney, which costs at least $200 an hour. She estimated that California households face a minimum of 12.5 million legal issues every year, which translates to $2.5 billion annually in lawyer fees.

The State Bar panel follows Washington and New York states’ lead by investigating the feasibility of developing and implementing standards for creating a limited license to practice law. The Washington Supreme Court adopted a rule allowing for “limited license legal technicians,” and New York’s chief judge has endorsed a similar idea. If approved in California, such a license would allow certified providers to deliver limited, discrete legal services to consumers in defined legal areas.

Other professional fields have offered similar solutions to keeping costs down, such as allowing nurse practitioners to provide some medical services instead of doctors.

“This approach benefits practically everyone up to the 1 percent,” Hadfield said. “Few people can afford an attorney at $200, minimum, an hour. This can benefit the poor, but also the middle-income Americans who may be facing foreclosure proceedings on their home, a child custody issue or an employment problem.”

State Bar trustee Loren Kieve of San Francisco said during the hearing, “I think we have clear evidence of unmet needs in the legal field. I think we would be abdicating our responsibility if we did not move forward with this.”

Hadfield cautioned the bar against simply licensing sole-practitioner paralegals as “lawyer lites.” Instead, the legal system’s regulatory approach needs to dramatically shift.

“We need to make a fundamental change in the way the judiciary regulates the practice of law,” she said. “We cannot possibly solve the access to justice problem without changes in our regulatory approach.”

Hadfield is a proponent of the British model, which authorizes a wide variety of professionals, organizations and corporations to provide legal help. She advocates allowing practitioners to work for corporations to cut costs on overhead and other inefficiencies.

“Online services in England allow you to pay a flat fee for a particular service,” Hadfield said. “For example, you might pay $200 for the simple management of a divorce. Or $230 to file the documents needed for a motion for child support change. What you really want is for the independent paralegals to work for corporations, similar to tax preparers at H&R Block. The idea is we need to get nonlegal costs out of the hourly rate charged by lawyers. Let an organization with scale and technology do it better.”

Hadfield has long advocated training non-Juris Doctor (JD) professionals to provide legal assistance to supplement the services of traditional JD-trained lawyers. Last October, she testified on the matter for the chief judge in New York. Hadfield, a member of the Legal Advisory Council for LegalZoom, also supports expanding the scope for similar low-cost online services to make legal assistance convenient, affordable and available to the general population.

The California State Bar appears to be moving closer to such crucial changes. At its hearing this month in San Francisco, the working group will recommend the creation of a practice board for limited licenses. They expect to post a draft governance structure by next week.

“I came out of this session feeling more hopeful than I expected,” Hadfield said. “If California can do this, it really moves the needle nationally. Washington state is moving ahead and New York is moving forward, and now there’s a real opportunity for California to make a significant leap.”

Conducted on May 27 to June 2, the poll found that 72 percent of Californians favor reduced sentences for nonviolent, low-level offenders, with 24 percent opposed. Seventy-four percent of California voters favored keeping those offenders in county custody instead of sending them to state prisons, with 20 percent opposed.

Sixty-three percent of Californians also preferred an early release for low-level, nonviolent offenders, compared to 31 percent who opposed the idea — a slight decrease from a July 2011 USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll that found 69 percent of California voters in favor of early release and 28 percent opposed to the idea.

However, the poll found that voters view public safety as a priority over saving taxpayer dollars. Forty-seven percent of Californians were more likely to agree with the statement: “California should not reduce the state’s prison population because a smaller prison population means more criminals back on the street and increased crime.”

In comparison, 41 percent of voters agreed more closely with the statement: “California should reduce the state’s prison population because a smaller prison population will save taxpayer dollars that could be better spent on other priorities.”

“Voters are very concerned about the cost of public safety and corrections, and they’re eager to find ways to reduce those costs,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “But when push comes to shove, they don’t want to sacrifice their safety in order to save money.”

By a slight majority, California voters were likely to support building more prisons or enlarging existing prisons to cope with overcrowding, with 53 percent of Californians supporting the idea and 42 percent opposed to it. Conversely, Californians were less likely to support paying for other states to house prisoners, with 59 percent of registered voters opposed to the idea and 33 percent in favor.

“Voters have a sense the state’s prisons are already costing them a lot of money, so when it comes to overcrowding measures that require even more spending, such as building new prisons or paying to house inmates out-of-state, they put their foot down,” said Drew Lieberman, vice president of Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, part of the bipartisan team with Republican polling firm American Viewpoint that conducted the poll.

When read a pair of statements describing the state of California prisons, voters were evenly split between recommendations for public safety to trump the prison cap versus alleviating prison overcrowding.

Forty-three percent of California voters said that they agreed more closely with the statement, “Some people, including Gov. Brown, say the prison cap should not take precedence over public safety,” and that California has already addressed the prison overcrowding problem by reducing the inmate population by 43,000, improved jail conditions, and that many low-level nonviolent offenders are already being housed in county jails rather than state prisons.

The statement continued: “Some jails are so full that counties have released certain parole violators rather than keep them in custody, so reducing the population further could put dangerous criminals back on the street.”

The second statement, which 44 percent of voters agreed with more strongly, stated that “Some people, including courts, say that California’s prisons are still overcrowded, they are providing unconstitutionally poor medical and mental health care, and violating prisoners’ human rights.” It continued that most prisons are housing more inmates than they were designed for, and that common-sense reform, such as reducing sentences for low-level, nonviolent crimes, should be used to reduce the prison population, comply with the Constitution and protect basic human rights.

When queried on the amount of crime in the state, 52 percent of California voters said they thought there was more crime in the state compared to a few years ago, with 32 percent reporting that there was “much more crime” and 20 percent reporting “somewhat more crime.” Twenty-six percent of Californians said they thought there was less crime statewide, with 20 percent reporting “somewhat less crime” and 6 percent reporting “much less crime.”

When polled on the amount of crime in their local area, 46 percent of Californians said they thought there was more crime than a few years ago; 27 percent said they believed there was less crime.

“It’s largely about perception,” said David Kanevsky, research director of American Viewpoint. “People are more in tune with what the level of crime is in their local neighborhood, but what drives their perception is of how bad crime is in the rest of the state is what they see on the news and read in the papers.”

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll was conducted on May 27 to June 2. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Additional poll results and methodology are available here.

“This is a national scandal and national tragedy,” said USC Gould School of Law Professor Elyn Saks at the Criminalization of Mental Illness symposium. “We need to find alternatives to this transinstitutionalization. People with mental disorders should get treatment not punishment.”

The two-day event, which was organized by the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics at USC, brought together nearly a dozen scholars, government officials, professionals and a judge, all who are making significant contributions to decriminalizing mental illness. More than 350 people attended the symposium, which also addressed such topics as jail diversion programs, juvenile justice and reducing the risk of recidivism.

Richard Bonnie, director of the University of Virginia’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, gave the keynote address, “In the Shadow of Tragedy: Is it Possible to Control the Message?” Bonnie, who served as chairman of Virginia’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform following the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, has long advocated for improvements in community mental health services. He has also led an effort to build a strong legal foundation for a recovery-oriented system of care and to enact innovative legislation.

“I think we understand fully what the problems are,” Bonnie said. “The question is how do we move the ball forward on the ground? We need to identify the best practices and develop the necessary cross-system coordination. We have done that in Virginia and tried to go community-by-community. We have tried to galvanize movement and sustain the reforms.

“Getting the message right and trying to stay on message and get organized is key,” he continued. “You have to be in this for the long run. I’ve been at the center of the storm because of the shooting at Virginia Tech.”

Clinical psychologist Stephen Mayberg, former director of the California Department of Mental Health, spoke about “Policy, Practice and Perception: Implications in the Criminalization of the Mentally Ill.”

During his 17 years with the department, Mayberg embarked on major initiatives to reform the mental health system. He noted that confusion continues to exist in the minds of the public, policymakers and sometimes even professionals when it comes to actions made by people struggling with mental health disorders. These include behaviors that result from being under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and behaviors that “simply result from bad decisions as though they were all the same thing,” he said.

“The unfortunate effects of this confusion most notably increase stigmatization of people with mental illness as though crime and danger were a common result of their situation,” Mayberg said. “It is important for us to focus on this matter of category errors in today’s conversation about the criminalization of mental illness because these errors confuse professional dialogue, impede problem-solving in both our justice and treatment systems, and create false public perceptions.”

Youth and teens suffering from mental illness face their own unique set of challenges — especially when they wind up in the justice system. Linda Teplin, professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, spoke about psychiatric disorders of youth in detention and the implications for criminalization.

“Our findings highlight the unanticipated consequences of deinstitutionalization,” she said. “Jails were never intended to be mental hospitals. And police were never intended to be the street corner psychiatrist.”

Judge Steven Leifman of the 11th Judicial Circuit Miami-Dade County Court said that transforming mental health systems is crucial. Constructing a comprehensive and competent criminal justice system that considers mental health and substance abuse treatment is key. a

“Every day our courts, jails and law enforcement agencies are witness to a parade of misery brought on by untreated mental illnesses,” Leifman said. “There is something terribly wrong with a society that is willing to spend more on imprisoning people with mental illnesses than to treat them.”

Next year, the Saks Institute will turn its attention to mental health and its impact on university students. It will hold a panel discussion in the fall and host a two-day symposium in the spring. For more information, visit http://weblaw.usc.edu/centers/saks/

About 45 percent of voters were against an increase in the use of fracking in California, and 37 percent supported an increase. Another 46 percent of voters said they would pass an immediate ban on fracking, which could only be lifted by the state legislature, and 42 percent opposed this proposal.

However, voter support for the drilling practice increases once potential economic benefits are mentioned, according to the poll results. More than half (56 percent) of voters said fracking should be legal in California if the additional oil and gas were used to reduce energy and gas prices, with 33 percent still opposed to fracking.

“Voters are very wary of the idea of fracking but when they’re told that it can reduce their bottom-line gasoline cost, they become more open-minded,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “People default into the position of not really wanting it until you inject the economic component into it.”

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, uses a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and other chemicals to extract oil and natural gas.

Fifty-eight percent of voters wanted to prohibit fracking in all areas near sources of groundwater, and 52 percent of voters favored offering tax ince-ntives to companies with a track record of fracking safely. Eighty-four percent of voters supported a requirement to inform property owners of fracking near their land.

“The message to the energy sector is pretty clear here: Californians are willing to let you go ahead as long as you’re willing to abide by stricter regulations,” Schnur said. “Nobody here is buying the argument that the federal regulation is enough.”

Opponents of fracking are the most staunchly rooted in their opinions, the poll results showed. When presented with statements both for and against fracking, 49 percent of voters agreed with a ban on fracking in California, saying that fracking benefits big oil and gas companies and poses serious health concerns; 39 percent agreed with this “strongly.”

This includes about 60 percent of minorities in California: 64 percent of black voters, 60 percent of Latino voters and 62 percent of Asian-American voters supported a ban on fracking when presented with a statement about health concerns. By double digits, white voters were much less likely to want to ban fracking despite health concerns, with 43 percent supporting a statewide ban.

In contrast, 33 percent of voters agreed with a statement to allow fracking to continue in the state, saying that it is already subject to federal regulations and would create tens of thousands of new jobs in California; 22 percent of voters agreed with the statement “strongly.”

Thirty-eight percent of white voters agreed with the statement about the economic benefits of fracking and would want the practice to continue in California, compared to 19 percent of black voters, 24 percent of Latino voters and 24 percent of Asian-American voters.

When asked about the creation of state-specific regulations in California on fracking, 43 percent of Republican voters supported fracking in the state with additional regulations that would hold companies accountable, 33 percent said it should continue without new regulations and 16 percent supported an outright ban. Among Democratic voters, 41 percent said they would support fracking if there are new regulations, 11 percent said the practice should continue as is and 37 percent supported a ban. Among voters with no party preference, 39 percent supported fracking with new regulations, 18 percent said no additional state regulations were necessary and 34 percent supported a state ban.

Regionally, support for fracking was strongest in the Central Valley, which sits on the Monterey Shale formation and a potential 15.4 billion barrels of oil that would require fracking to be tapped. Sixty-nine percent of voters in the Central Valley said fracking should be legal, and 24 percent supported a statewide ban. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where support for fracking was the weakest, 50 percent of voters said fracking should be legal and 38 percent supported a ban.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll was conducted on May 27 to June 2. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Additional poll results and methodology are available here.

“Even while Californians are concerned about the high cost of higher education, they understand very strongly that the value of that education should not be compromised,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “They’d obviously like to have a high quality college education available at affordable prices, but when forced to choose, they prioritize quality over cost.”

California voters were split about Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed changes to California public universities. Forty-five percent supported a proposal to freeze tuition and fees at public universities for four years and 42 percent opposed, with many voters saying reduced funding could hurt the quality of education and lead to tuition spikes down the road.

Voters were largely against another proposal by Brown to tie some state funding to the percentage of students graduating within four years. Fifty-one percent of voters said the proposal could force universities to inflate grades and lower graduation standards, leading to students who are unqualified or unprepared for the workforce and diminishing the value of a degree from the University of California (UC) or California State University systems. Forty percent supported the proposal, agreeing that it would hold universities accountable for making sure students get the courses they need to graduate more quickly and help make college more affordable.

Voters who were parents and voters who had not gone to college were more concerned about affordability and access to public universities. Voters who were not college educated were closely split (40-39) on whether educational quality or lower tuition, respectively, was more important. In contrast, 51 percent of college-educated voters preferred a focus on maintaining a high quality education to keeping tuition low, and 33 percent prioritized lower costs.

Children also seemed to have a significant effect on how voters viewed the future of public education: Voters with kids prioritized lower tuition over educational quality, 43-to-40. The reverse was true of voters without kids, who said maintaining educational quality was more important than controlling the cost of attending college, 48-to-34.

“The results show how the cost of higher education is squeezing the middle class,” said David Kanevsky, research director of Republican polling firm American Viewpoint, part of the bipartisan team with Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner that conducted the poll. “Across income lines, it is the middle class that is most likely to perceive college as unaffordable. For those without a college degree, going to college is an attainability issue as a much higher percentage of them say California’s public universities are not affordable.”

By race, Latino voters were much more likely than other demographic groups to perceive the state’s public universities as affordable: 47 percent of Latino voters said a public higher education in California was affordable, about even with the 48 percent who said it was too expensive. Conversely, black voters were much more likely to think tuition at public universities was too expensive, with 62 saying it was not affordable and 32 percent who said it was affordable. Among white voters, 58 percent said public universities were too expensive and 35 percent said they were affordable. Among Asian American voters, 54 percent said they were too expensive and 40 percent said they were affordable.

Almost 59 percent of voters supported increasing the availability of online courses that maintain the same high academic standards while providing more flexibility and reducing the costs of a college education. Thirty-four percent opposed the idea of offering more online classes, saying it would limit the educational experience and diminish the value of a college degree.

In addition, voters opposed increasing the proportion of out-of-state students, who typically pay higher tuition, admitted to UC or Cal State universities: 57 percent opposed accepting more out-of-state students and 33 percent supported it, saying the extra tuition could protect California public universities without raising taxes.

Overall, a plurality of voters said California’s public universities — widely considered the best public higher education system in the nation — were getting worse. Thirty-six percent of voters said the state’s public universities were getting worse, 26 percent said they were about the same and 21 percent said they were improving.

State economy is on the rise, voters say

Optimism about the California economy is at its highest level since the beginning of the Great Recession, with nearly half of the voters in the largest statewide poll of registered voters saying the state economy had seen its darkest days and was now starting to improve.

In the latest USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll, 49 percent of California voters said the state economy was on an upward trajectory, the first time in the four years since USC Dornsife and the Times began their polling partnership that hope has outweighed pessimism on the state economy — and a surge of nearly 27 percentage points in optimism over the last two years.

In addition to the nearly half of voters who said the economy had turned around and was improving, another one in five voters (20 percent) said that while things were not yet getting better, the state had already seen the worst. Twenty-six percent said the state economy was still on the decline.

Less than two years ago, in July 2011, just 22 percent of voters were optimistic about the state’s economy, and 73 percent said things were not improving or getting worse.

“California is still lagging behind the national recovery, but state voters are beginning to feel more enthusiastic about their economic futures,” Schnur said. “Californians are not thrilled about their state’s prospects at the moment, but they’re in a much better place than they have been for a long time. They’re not overly optimistic yet, but ambivalence is a step in the right direction.”

The increased optimism about the state’s economy was reflected in approval numbers for Brown. For the first time since he took office in 2011, Brown’s approval numbers have hit the 50 percent mark, though it remains statistically steady from recent USC Dornsife/LA Times polls that showed his approval at 49 percent in both March 2013 and November 2012. In the latest poll, 34 percent of voters disapproved of the job being done by Brown.

“What struck me is the flatness of Brown’s approval rating across demographic groups. There’s no gap on gender, age or income, and white voters actually support him in higher numbers than Latinos,” said Drew Lieberman, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. “That flatness speaks to the broadness of the range of policy prescriptions he has offered so far in office. His approach is not leaving anyone behind.”

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll was conducted May 27 to June 2. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Additional poll results and methodology are available here.

In particular, Guerrero is interested in examining how the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, will improve the integration of substance abuse treatment, mental health care and HIV prevention programs, as well as its effects on treatment outcomes among African-American and Latino clients. The study is one of just five federally funded grants in the country focused on these questions.

“This area of inquiry is still developing, and it offers many opportunities to explore this historic policy legislation and its impact on people, particularly low-income racial and ethnic minorities,” he said.

Guerrero received a $428,327 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to support the first two years of the project. Successful achievement of milestones during the initial phase will lead to funding for an additional three years, totaling $1.1 million.

The phased nature of the project fits well with the framework of the ACA, which is slowly being introduced into the health care landscape over a matter of years. Guerrero hopes to establish a baseline understanding of treatment and care before the legislation is fully implemented to better understand its overall effect.

“Given that health care reform in its initial stages was very ambiguous and was gradually gaining support, this grant conforms to that process of gradually understanding where health reform is going,” he said.

Guerrero plans to conduct surveys with approximately 750 staff members in 157 substance abuse treatment programs in Los Angeles County, including program directors, supervisors and counselors. Information on organizational factors, such as expansion of the public health insurance program known as Medicaid and pressure from policymakers and regulators to provide health and mental health care under one roof, will be linked to data about all clients receiving treatment for substance use issues in the county, an estimated 10,000 people every year.

Making those connections between national health care policies and how individual clients respond to treatment is an innovative component of the project, Guerrero said, and will provide a better understanding of how services can be delivered more effectively, particularly to low-income and minority clients.

“This is a nice contribution to trying to link historic policy initiatives with organizations’ practices and roles, such as leadership and readiness for change to client outcomes that are reported by the clients themselves,” he said. “That’s what I’m feeling the most optimistic and excited about.”

In addition to collaborating with Lawrence Palinkas and Chih-Ping Chou at the School of Social Work, who are serving as co-investigators on the project, Guerrero will work with representatives from the county’s Substance Abuse and Prevention Control division. He said county officials have been involved in his previous research efforts and characterized the collaboration as critical to the success of the new project.

“They see the kind of development and knowledge they need to make policy decisions,” he said. “None of this could be possible if they were not supportive, and they did not share their data.”

By identifying strategies to reduce health disparities, increase access to integrated care and reduce HIV infection rates in some of the more impoverished areas of LA County, Guerrero said the project can create a roadmap for improving standards of care among vulnerable populations throughout the United States.

“Everybody talks about the need, but when you look at the kind of research that is funded and the interventions that are funded, they aren’t being implemented in these areas with low resources,” he said. “We just have to do a lot more work and make the extra effort to reach out to the neediest communities.”

This cause and effect is a theme that runs throughout Therapy, a play written and directed by USC School of Social Work alumnus Jeff Bernhardt MSW ’94 that shows how the line between professional and personal issues can become blurry.

Other characters include Lance, a depressed man in his 20s who masks his pain with sarcasm and who meets with Steven for therapy just to spite his parents with the bill. Somewhat new to private practice, Steven struggles to connect with Lance and airs his grievances and childhood wounds to Moira, an earth mother who meditates in her free time. The last of the play’s therapists is Sandra, a “consummate professional” who seems to have mastered leaving her personal problems at the door.

Bernhardt said he wanted to humanize the counseling profession through his characters.

“It was very important for me to present it in a realistic way,” Bernhardt said. “Oftentimes, the only experience people have with therapy is through the media, which doesn’t show what it’s really like to be a therapist or what issues come up.”

Therapy had nine showings over three weekends in March at the Secret Rose Theatre in Los Angeles. Sitting in the audience on opening night was Robin Siegal, an adjunct lecturer at the School of Social Work. After seeing the play, Siegal decided to sponsor it through California Psych Resources, an organization that promotes creative and applicable training for professionals in continuing education

“This was the first time I saw a play where social workers were therapists in private practice. That usually isn’t how we’re portrayed in the media,” Siegal said. “Bernhardt’s play helps demonstrate to the public that we’re capable of more things than being foster care workers.”

Bernhardt, who has worked as a social worker serving families and college students, said the play stems from the questions and experiences he was challenged with after the suicide of one of his former clients. As he worked through his thoughts and unresolved feelings from the incident, he started writing Therapy.

His emotional connection to the play can be seen in how his characters deal with abandonment, hopelessness and anger in a way the audience can relate to. Moira is a nurturing therapist in her office, but she struggles with the guilt of being unable to help her mother, who is suffering from dementia, because they live in different states. Just as the play isn’t only about therapy, Bernhardt’s characters aren’t only therapists — they are also people with their own concerns.

The National Association of Social Workers, which praised Therapy, chose to recognize Bernhardt with its Social Work Image Award. The honor is given to those who have advanced the profession through their work. Bernhardt said he was honored to receive the award because authentically representing social workers was important to him when creating the play.

“While I did not write Therapy with the goal of promoting a positive self-image of social workers, it was very important to me to portray the characters not as clichés or as stereotypes but as human beings with professional values and personal struggles,” Bernhardt said. “I got powerful reactions from people who never really understood what it was like to be a therapist, and the people who were therapists said they felt very validated by the way it was presented.”

Bernhardt currently works as a Jewish educator and communal professional but devotes most of his time to his writing career. He previously wrote the play Mixed Blessings and published the book On Sacred Ground: Jewish and Christian Clergy Reflect on Transformative Passages From the Five Books of Moses.

Bernhardt said his experience at USC greatly influenced Therapy.

“In writing and thinking about the play, I called upon my education, my internships and my work after I graduated,” he said. “Even though my schooling was 20 years ago, it was the foundation for everything that came later and everything that I’ve done since.”