As students march in protest and university trustees talk policy, the biggest shadow cast by California's higher education budget cuts and fee increases isn't the immediate hardships for students and their colleges, but the state's lack of direction and vision.

The most significant element in that budget is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to put a greater share of the pain on the state's four-year universities than on the community colleges - to emphasize access over research and high-end quality.

Under the state's fiscal circumstances, that may not be an unreasonable decision. The community colleges have gotten the short end of the stick for years. But it also has left a lot of academics wondering whether the governor really understands the invaluable asset that the state's higher education system represents. And since Schwarzenegger wants to raise graduate student fees by some 40 percent, he's also jeopardizing one of the state's highest priorities - the effort to attract better people into teaching. Making them pay 40 percent more is hardly a come-on.

The decision to favor access is an obvious departure from those of prior administrations, which almost invariably favored the politically influential University of California over the much larger but otherwise politically weak two-year colleges. But if the switch signals anything more than the administration's short-term belief that it can get more bang for its buck in the community colleges, no one is saying.

In the "exceptional bind" that the state finds itself, said Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Anne McKinney, the immediate task "is enrollment management." And as last week's fee debates at the separate meetings of the UC regents and trustees of the California State University made clear, the administration is glad to leave as much of that hot potato in other people's hands.

But since the governor's car tax cut added $4 billion to the "exceptional bind," since his budget doesn't increase access anywhere and since it hamstrings the options of the state's colleges and universities, the situation would be truly frightening if it were anything but an ad hoc response.

Even before Schwarzenegger was elected last fall, budget cuts - fee increases, reduced space in courses, the spill-over from UC and CSU - had already reduced access in the community colleges so much that an estimated 175,000 students had been driven out of the system.

The governor is correct that his proposed community college fee increases - from $18 to $26 per unit ($780 per year for a full load) - will enable students to qualify for the maximum federal Pell Grant (of $4,000 a year), thereby ending the state's inadvertent subsidy to the federal program.

He's also right that even with the proposed increases, California community college students will still be paying less than 40 percent of what the average American community college student pays, and that most of California's university students, graduate and undergraduate, still pay considerably less than the average in other U.S. public universities.

But in the very act of citing those comparisons, Schwarzenegger raises fundamental questions about the direction in which he proposes to go. A growing number of major public universities - Michigan and Virginia particularly - have been sent well down the road toward privatization, where taxpayers bear an ever-shrinking part of the cost, and tuition, grants and revenues from various big-bucks entrepreneurial programs pay the difference. Is that the way California is headed?

It's not clear that anyone in Schwarzenegger's shop has yet confronted such questions. The governor likes to talk about the wonderful opportunities California offered when he first arrived here as an immigrant in 1968 - the period of the great expansion of California's universities, when college attendance was virtually free.

But as so many of those UC professors now ask: Does he understand how much the quality of those institutions - the research they perform, the people they draw, the possibilities they offer - contribute both to California's business climate and its quality of life? It's premature to say that the promise of the state's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education has been broken. The master plan guarantees UC admission to the top 12.5 percent of the state's high school graduates and CSU admission to the top third, but it also makes the two-year colleges the gateways to the universities. If Schwarzenegger's proposal to shift more of the instructional load in the first two years to the community colleges increases the number of transfers to the four-year colleges, it might actually help revitalize that promise.

But until there are decent data, there's no way to know. It's that ignorance about the condition of the system - and California's broader indifference to planning and serious thought about its future - that's so potentially damaging.

A great many of the cuts and shifts and fudges in California's higher education budget might be defensible if there were a longer term vision. Schwarzenegger came to office promising to be a leader, but so far his clearest call has been for a resolute march to the rear.