Community College District Debates Recruiting of More Foreign Students : Enrollment: Some board members call those from abroad a revenue source. But critics say high fees can create undue hardships.

Beset by financial shortfalls and dwindling enrollment, Ventura County Community College District leaders are debating whether to recruit more foreign students who pay hefty tuition and other surcharges.

Foreign students provide a cash windfall for the college district because their education is not subsidized by taxpayers and they pay a minimum of $3,120 in tuition and fees a year. Even with recent fee hikes, a full-time student from California pays $312 annually.

Last fall, Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges, with a total enrollment of 26,588, collectively enrolled 239 foreign students without a district-coordinated recruitment effort.

The five trustees of the college district have widely varying views on how foreign student recruitment should be handled.

At one end of the spectrum, Gregory P. Cole would rather the district ignore the whole issue and concentrate on the instruction of American students.

“There’s something inherently wrong with trying to attract foreign nationals,” said Cole, who has also announced plans to run for the Thousand Oaks City Council. “We have enough problems trying to educate our own American students.”

On the other end, Pete Tafoya argues that board members should decrease the surcharges on foreign students to make Ventura County colleges more attractive. Tafoya also recently requested a district study on the possible benefits of recruiting more foreign students.

“I’m asking for a change in paradigm, to use these students as a revenue source,” he said. “We can take a more positive role in this, or we can continue to treat them like someone we don’t want.”

College board President Allan Jacobs said that after considering the matter, he has come to agree with Tafoya’s position.

Trustees Karen Boone and Timothy Hirschberg concur that recruiting foreign students may be a good idea for the cash-strapped district, but they see no reason to lower their fees, or even to refrain from raising them.

“I don’t want our local taxpayers to subsidize the education of foreign students,” Hirschberg said. “With the squeeze hitting our public institutions today, we need to be responsible to our local taxpayers.”

Last year, foreign students paid $110 per unit, the $13 per unit charged by the state on all students, plus a newly added foreign student surcharge of $5 per unit. Earlier this month, district trustees voted 3 to 2 to increase that surcharge by $2 per unit, with the added money going toward a district construction fund.

Tafoya and Jacobs voted against the $2 surcharge.

For their part, some foreign students are bitter about the escalating fees.

“I came to the States because I was just curious of seeing the land of milk and honey,” said Opiyo Odhiambo, 27, an Oxnard College student from Nairobi, Kenya. “But here they are milking the bits of money I have by raising the fees every semester.”

Odhiambo, who is living with family friends near the college, said he is just scraping by with a 7 1/2-hour-per-week, $5-per-hour job at the campus library, and can barely afford the surcharges levied by the board.

Some college staff who work directly with foreign students are also irritated by the board’s penchant for increasing foreign students’ fees while simultaneously making little effort to accommodate them.

These staff members say that whatever push for change that exists at the district level is in part the result of their own constant harping on the needs and struggles of the colleges’ foreign populations.

“One thing that seems really wrong with this system is we make these foreign students jump through hoops,” said Judy Arnold, an adviser to Moorpark College’s foreign students for about five years. “We need to encourage them, to broaden their program, but we don’t need to constantly increase their fees.”

Foreign student advisers say such students not only get an education at local colleges, but also immeasurably add to the education of their American classmates.

“I find they really enrich campus life and help our students learn about other cultures,” said Pat Preston, the foreign student administrative officer at Santa Monica College.

Out of a student body of 26,000, Santa Monica College has 2,300 foreign students, Preston said. The students bring about $8.5 million to the college every year that helps fund extra classes and myriad programs the cash-strapped college could otherwise not afford, officials say.

As a result, college officials fly all over the world recruiting foreign students, attending English language schools and study abroad fairs, pitching the attractions of their California campus.

Tafoya and college staff hold up Santa Monica as a college that has benefited from foreign student recruitment.

“The Santa Monica Community College District uses foreign students as a revenue source,” Tafoya said. “Right now, we’re not marketing for foreign students. Every time you increase fees, no matter how much, you lose students.”

Not all foreign students, however, balk at higher fees. Kinuko Osada, for instance, finds the United States in general--and Oxnard College in specific--a bargain, compared to her native Japan.

Osada, 31, moved in with her aunt in Oxnard in December and registered at Oxnard College this month.

“I thought I need to study English,” she said. “If I go to university in Japan, it’s more expensive.”

A civil servant at her local city hall since high school graduation, Osada decided this year to make a change. She has visited the United States before, but this time, she quit her job, gathered up her belongings and money, and moved halfway around the world.

“My family--well, they don’t like it, but they can’t stop me,” she explained. “It is unusual in my part of the country--I come from a rural area--for women to do something like this.”

Osada said she hopes to continue on to a four-year university after receiving her associate’s degree from Oxnard College.

Actually, Moorpark College’s Arnold said, foreign students are often among the best at the college, with 80% of Moorpark’s foreign students continuing on to a four-year institution upon graduation.

“They usually do very, very well scholastically,” she said.

Moorpark College’s foreign students often tutor American students and are even occasionally called on to lecture a class about a subject that relates to their home country, she said.

“In the classrooms, foreign students can add to political discussions,” she said. “They bring reality into the classrooms.”