The first couple of fingers have been amputated, and now the question is how much more has to go to save the victim. The patient is California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which promised a place in some college or university for every student who could take advantage of it, and which became a beacon to the world.

The cutting began in earnest this year, though it had been predictable -- and the issue widely ignored -- even during the good times of the late 1990s.

In the community colleges, enrollment is down 40,000 students from last year. Another 50,000, part of California's tidal wave of college hopefuls, had been expected to enroll. They never showed up.

That's a total decrease of some 5 percent of the system's 1.7 million students. At a time when the economy and sharp increases in the college-age population -- many of them Asians and Latinos -- demand more college opportunities, the state is providing fewer.

But the budget-cutting, calibrated in the hundreds of millions -- a reduction for the University of California of $410 million alone -- and the curbs on student enrollment, measured in the tens of thousands, is only part of the story.

More important is the possibility that the guarantees of the master plan -- the promise that all successful community college students can transfer to UC or the California State University; that there'll be place for everyone somewhere; that fees will be predictable, if not low; and that all segments of the system will provide high-quality education -- are all in jeopardy.

UC, CSU and the community colleges, like other state agencies, have been notified by the Department of Finance to plan for additional budget cuts of as much as 20 percent for the next fiscal year.

That's probably a worst-case scenario, maybe even a classic Washington Monument strategy. But with fees rising steeply, with UC reporting that it already has 12,000 students for whom it has no state funding and with the Legislature providing no money for enrollment growth at either UC or CSU for 2004-05, the problems are real enough.

According to UC Assistant Vice President Dennis Galligani, while the university is still honoring transfer guarantees for community college students, it returned 1,500 applications for admission in January. At CSU, which has some campus space for spring, enrollment growth will go down from a projected 7 percent to 3.5 percent. That's a difference of roughly 10,000 students.

The result is a bumping down of students from the four year systems to the two-year colleges and, inevitably, a bumping out of thousands of community college students, most of them working people, who can't get the courses they need.

All three segments are now engaged in extended discussions that raise very difficult questions.

By law, UC is supposed to admit any student in the top 12.5 percent of each year's graduating class. The university itself doesn't know whether it's over or under that threshold. But if it does take fewer, should it simply raise standards or should it eliminate students it can't accommodate by some sort of lottery? That decision itself has great implications, not least for its effect on the ethnic composition of the campuses.

More important, to what extent can the university -- and CSU as well -- mitigate the crush by greater productivity? And, even more difficult, to what extent could UC redirect more funds to undergraduate instruction? Tenured UC professors, like those at many other prestige institutions, teach no more than one or two courses each quarter. Asking them to do more, UC officials say, would drive the best away to greener pastures.

But retired physics professor Charles Schwartz has long maintained that UC in fact spends far less on the education of undergraduates than its official figures indicate, diverting the balance to graduate programs and research.

Unscrambling that budgetary omelet isn't easy, and taking money from graduate programs that UC also says are badly underfunded may damage UC in other ways. But it's nonetheless something that deserves attention.

In any case, there are other ways of increasing the system's productivity -- through technology, and by making the path to the degree, in Spence's words, "straighter and more direct." What that means particularly is aligning requirements -- from high school on -- so students aren't forced to repeat courses because, for example, beginning chemistry in one place is radically different from beginning chemistry somewhere else.

And then there's the lingering matter of remedial courses. CSU is taking major steps to reduce the number of students taking basic math and/or English, but some 25 percent of community college courses are in basic subjects students should have mastered in high school.

But what the system needs most is consistent long-term planning -- to make fees, revenues and student aid predictable, to reduce dependence on Sacramento's boom-bust politics and to avoid the fatal tendency, as California Post Secondary Education Commission President Bob Moore said, "to just muddle along." It's that muddling that got us here.