Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton wants to build a tuition-free business school in East Los Angeles aimed at income-qualified California students, complete with paid internships, company mentors and a startup incubator. He says he'd push to fund a pilot program in his very first state budget if he wins the governor's race. What he hasn't said is how much any of it would cost.
A School Built Around Founding Companies, Not Just Studying Them
Hilton's campaign laid out the proposal Friday, framing it as a way to give students from working-class communities direct access to business education and a real shot at starting their own companies, according to MyNewsLA.com. The plan calls for a business incubator on site, privately backed seed funding for student ventures, mentors drawn from California companies, and paid internships built into the curriculum.
“East LA needs an elite school that teaches students how to found a company, finance it, build it and lead it,” Hilton said, according to the outlet's report. He added that the talent for such a venture is already there, waiting on the resources to match it.
Universities Would Compete for the Job
Rather than picking a partner outright, the campaign said it would invite UCLA, USC, Claremont McKenna College and other universities to compete for the role of founding academic partner. The winning institution would be expected to help combine existing higher-education and workforce resources with matching support from employers and philanthropic organizations, per the same report.
Hilton's campaign said the proposal would not create a new state bureaucracy and would not require a new tax. The pitch calls for the first class to begin during his first term if he's elected, with the possibility of expanding the East Los Angeles model to other communities in California should the pilot succeed.
No Dollar Figure Attached
What's missing from the announcement is any projected cost for either standing up the school or running it year to year. The campaign did not provide those figures, leaving open how a governor would translate the idea into an actual budget line. In California, funding proposals like this typically move through Budget Change Proposals, which the California Department of Finance describes as items approved by the administration before being submitted to the Legislature, with implementing details later spelled out in trailer bill language, according to its own materials.
Hilton is running against Xavier Becerra, a former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, in the race for governor. Becerra's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the East Los Angeles proposal, MyNewsLA reported.
Tuition-free, employer-linked education models aren't unheard of elsewhere. A biomedical entrepreneurship program at NYU, for instance, has been offered without tuition to graduate students, faculty, researchers and staff there, according to research published on pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Whether Hilton's East LA concept follows a similar structure remains to be seen, since his campaign has not detailed an admissions process, enrollment target or campus site for the proposed school.
