Schrag: Prop 92 Shortchanges California Community Colleges

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

It's no secret that California's community colleges are underfunded and have been for years. But the prime reason isn't inadequate state money, but the lowest fees in the country under a fee policy that costs the system and its students millions in federal grants and loans.

Now, with Proposition 92, the community college lobby wants to cut fees some more, from $20 a unit to $15, meaning a reduction from $600 a year to $450 for a full course load, and change state funding formulas to add yet another Rube Goldberg machine to the convoluted fiscal system already in place.

Net cost to the treasury: about $300 million a year in the years to come, all advertised, of course, as costing taxpayers nothing. Backers of the measure, which is on the February ballot, also claim the fee cut will make community college more accessible.

That's misleading as well, since the fees represent no more than maybe 5 percent of the real cost, which includes living expenses, books, transportation and a variety of other expenses. For students who don't live at home, the fee reduction amounts to roughly 1 percent of the total cost.

And since fees are already so low, and would be lower still, many thousands of California students who would otherwise be eligible for federal Pell grants and student loans aren't eligible, even though they're otherwise qualified.

Maybe the most blatant element of the initiative is that its funding growth formula would be decoupled from growth in community college enrollment – as it is now – and instead tied (again in convoluted ways) to the number of Californians in the college-going ages and to the state's unemployment rate. As a consequence, in the words of the legislative analyst, "there would be no direct relationship between required (community college) funding levels and actual student enrollment."

The gimmick here is that the young adult population will grow faster in the years ahead than the number of K-12 students and thus faster than community college enrollment. In 13 of the past 16 years, according to the California Budget Project, the proposed formula would have raised growth-based funding at more than twice the rate of actual enrollment growth.