Proposition 92: Community College Funding and Fees – NO

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter L. Stahl
Pete Rates the Propositions

Every year, Prop 98 guarantees schools and community colleges 40% of the General Fund—about $45 billion. And every year, the Legislature engages in a tug-of-war over how to divide that funding between K-12 schools and community colleges. In recent years the solution has been a consistent 90/10, and this will probably continue for the foreseeable future. However, the Legislature holds the power to alter the proportion should the need arise.

Community college advocates aren’t satisfied with this. They claim they were promised not ten, but eleven percent of the Prop 98 funding guarantee back in 1988, and that the state is now billions of dollars “in arrears” in funding the colleges. In order to correct this, they have given us Prop 92, which will decouple the funding guarantee for community colleges and K-12 schools and restore community college funding to what it “should” be.

Here’s how it will work: The K-12 portion of Prop 98 funding will break off and sail away with its existing ratcheting mechanism, ensuring that the schools’ $41 billion will continue to swell (but never shrink) each year in response to increases in personal income and K-12 enrollment.

The remaining chunk, for community colleges, currently about $4.1 billion, would be massaged every year by a new machine. This would raise funding levels in response to increases in personal income and the population of young adults. The rates of growth of two demographics, 17-21 and 22-25, would be measured, and the higher one used as the multiplier for community college funding.

The statistically-minded among you will see instantly that this is certain to be higher than the aggregate growth rate of the whole age bracket from 17 to 25. For example, imagine that some year the 17-to-21-year-old population grows 2% but the 22-to-25-year-old population declines 2%. The overall growth rate of the community college demographic would be zero, more or less, but Prop 92’s sly scheme would ignore the 22-to-25-year-olds and grow community college funding 2% due to the younger bracket. If I recall correctly, the technical term for this type of formula is “cheating.”