Community College Crisis

Last month, the leaders of California’s community college system upbraided Los Angeles district officials for granting large, across-the-board pay raises despite a $1.3-million budget deficit. Last week, trustees of the nine-campus district announced that the deficit was actually 10 times bigger. Cause for alarm has escalated to crisis.

The district board of trustees bears much of the responsibility for letting the steep slide into debt occur without warning. And it is the trustees’ responsibility to act immediately to stave off a state takeover, even if it means challenging the staff unions that helped elect them.

Interim Chancellor James Heinselman and the trustees should quickly sell off the district’s downtown headquarters, bought for $12 million in 1990 but never occupied. Almost as quickly they should trim the district’s generous employee benefits and lay off staff. There is also money to be had by commercializing the district’s vast and valuable property at Woodland Hills’ Pierce College, if neighborhood objections can be overcome.

But these are Band-Aids, not solutions. Once they get past the immediate crisis, trustees, faculty and administrators will have to give up their perpetual feuding and turn to solving the real problem: not enough students.

In 1987, the state stopped requiring students to attend community colleges in the districts where they lived and students voted with their feet. The Los Angeles district’s enrollment fell sharply as students fled to richer suburban campuses in Santa Monica, Pasadena and elsewhere. State funding is pegged to student enrollment, so the math of the current crisis is easy to calculate.

What the district should have done at the first dip was study how to meet student needs--for example with multimedia classes and packages of courses for welfare recipients who needed job skills. Instead, the district started eliminating classes, leading to further drops in enrollment and funding. Now, say some trustees, the district might have to cancel all of the classes it planned to hold this summer. What worse solution could they devise?

The district should not only ensure that summer school classes are held but put a spotlight on every student-unfriendly policy on its campuses. Many L.A. community college courses are offered in the morning--not because that’s when students need them (what they want and can’t get is nights and weekends) but because that’s when most faculty members prefer to teach them. Faculty department chairs decide which courses are offered and when. Those chairpersons are elected by teachers, so how can they answer to students’ best interests?

College presidents need more power over faculty hours and courses offered. Some staff contracts currently allow too little work for too much pay, for instance giving “overload pay” to faculty members teaching as few as three courses a week. There is no reward to individual campuses that increase enrollment and no penalty for losses.

Accountability problems are not unique to the Los Angeles district. The state office, for instance, has also criticized the South Orange County Community College District for granting pay increases to its faculty--already the highest-paid of any community college district in the state. But the Los Angeles district’s problems are much worse.

The district’s trustees were elected with the help of tens of thousands of dollars from faculty unions, so it will not be easy for them to summon the political will to upset the status quo. But if they fail to develop a sound and cost-effective strategic plan, and quickly, the state chancellor’s office should make good on its threat to chart a plan for them.