PERSPECTIVE ON HIGHER EDUCATION : Begin College the Two-Year Way : If 100,000 more students attended community colleges and transferred, educational and budget goals could be met.

As far as higher education goes, our current budget crisis puts Gov. Pete Wilson in an uncomfortable double bind. Simple equity, for example, calls for higher education to bear its fair share of the cuts required by California’s predicted $12-billion shortfall. On the other hand, the future economic and social health of California is bound to suffer if the cuts deny students, especially minority students, access to higher education.

Wilson’s position of strength in dealing with this dilemma can be summed up in one phrase: the California community colleges. For taxpayers, community-college education is still quite cheap, requiring only $2,500 for each full-time first- or second-year student--as opposed to roughly $6,000 for such a student in the California State University system and $12,000 in the University of California system. Given this student-cost disparity, Wilson could save $650 million and still preserve current levels of overall enrollment by cutting $600 million from the UC system (50,000 students), $300 million from the CSU system (another 50,000 students) and shifting $250 million of these cuts to our community colleges. Because their academic structure allows for substantial flexibility, the state’s 106 community colleges could accommodate an additional 100,000 first- and second-year students.

This cut-and-shift approach would still permit the students affected to earn four-year degrees (which students are increasingly taking five years or more to earn) by transferring to either a UC or CSU campus for their final years. Indeed, as opposed to five years years ago, community-college transfer students now equal and in many instances surpass the performance of students who take their first two years at UC and CSU, as indicated by public-record evidence regarding completion rates, grades and standardized tests like the CSU graduation-requirement writing-proficiency examination.

From a student’s point of view, it should be emphasized that transfer from a community college to UC or CSU is today a practical matter. Five years ago, for example, the aspiring transfer student faced a dark and fearful maze of conflicting requirements, with the result that many transfer students ended up losing a full semester’s credits when they enrolled in UC or CSU.

Today, however, thanks to the clearheaded work of a number of articulation committees, an entering community-college student has explicit information and sound guidance regarding what to take for transfer credit at neighboring UC and CSU campuses, including both general-education requirements and requirements for specific major fields. Academic transcripts indicate that community-college transfer students today move to UC and CSU without any wasted academic time. Not surprisingly, high school counselors have begun to emphasize the transfer alternative to good students, not just marginal ones, and at least one CSU (Dominguez Hills) has begun to recruit aggressively from among its neighboring community colleges.

From the point of view of UC and CSU administrators, the cut-and-shift approach set forth here may be perceived as creating hardship, especially in settings where lower-division programs have served as a source of support for graduate programs and other worthy projects. But there is some evidence indicating that first- and second-year programs at UC and CSU have an increasingly high hidden-cost level: student aid, counseling services, remedial services, pre-baccalaureate programs, etc.

And there is overwhelming evidence that UC and CSU full-time faculty vastly prefer to teach upper-division courses, as opposed to the courses duplicated at community college. At a time when we must all be prepared to “take a hit,” as Speaker Willie Brown has tartly put it, a cut in lower-division enrollment would create far less a hardship for students at UC and CSU than a corresponding cut in pre-professional and graduate programs.

The most powerful argument in support of the cut-and-shift approach can be summed up in another phrase: anti-elitism.

As matters stand, entrance as a freshman to both UC and CSU depends upon meeting rigorous entrance requirements that are--with good reason--perceived as unfair and elitist by many students and their families. But community-college entrance requirements are today quite liberal, giving even a high school dropout the opportunity to enroll, take appropriate courses and move step by step as far up the educational or career ladder as he or she wants to go--and there’s certainly a wealth of anecdotal evidence that many such students move far indeed.

To sum up: Our California community colleges have always been “open door” colleges: for minority students, for older students and for late bloomers. As Wilson and his colleagues in Sacramento attack our current budget crisis, they should keep our community-college doors open--and maybe even open them wider.