Living on Leftovers

California’s community colleges are still receiving the state’s budget leftovers, and leftovers do little to help a long-undernourished system. The state could pay a price for such neglect.

Under Gov. George Deukmejian’s budget, community colleges are receiving more money than they did when he took office. But this year’s 6.4% increase from the state’s general fund, as in past years, goes mostly to keep pace with rising costs or to adjust for swings in enrollment. Community colleges need enough money to act on the quality of faculty members and on academic help to increase the number of students qualified to transfer to four-year campuses, and to better train students who use the colleges to learn job skills. As things stand, the colleges get barely enough money to react to changes that threaten to overwhelm them.

Community colleges are increasingly the entry point to higher education for immigrants and minorities as well as a training ground for the employees whom California businesses will need in an increasingly competitive economy. They must not remain the system’s stepchild.

The governor’s proposed budget does earmark money for continuing a testing and counseling program designed to help students choose the program best for them, but that is neither a new program nor all that needs to be done.

And reform-minded legislators and educators are talking about doing much more. They want to improve teaching at the community colleges by hiring and retaining full-time faculty members with solid academic credentials rather than relying on part-time faculty members as many of the colleges do. Full-timers cost more both in salaries and benefits. Legislative sources estimate that $50 million should be set aside to help the colleges with this change. Had the governor wanted to encourage this transition, his budget might have given a nod in that direction.

Not only is there little money in the community colleges’ budget that could be viewed as encouragement of reforms under discussion in the Legislature, there is little left that the state can spend for anything before it hits the Gann spending limits. The latter is not the governor’s fault, but neither is he actively resisting the limits.

No one expected any endorsement of the major legislative reform measure, AB 1725, in a gubernatorial budget. But there was no mention at all in either the budget or the State of the State address of helping the community colleges to get their houses in order .

The California community colleges are too important to have to play catch-up every year. This is the year to start changing the rules--a job for which there is more than enough work to go around for the Legislature and the governor.