Save the 2-Year Colleges

Gov. Pete Wilson and the candidates vying to replace him are all climbing aboard the education reform bandwagon. But a measure of who’s serious about education will be a candidate’s willingness to tackle the state’s hardest and least visible educational challenge: the troubled community college system.

Californians assume that there will always be a place for them or their children in the community colleges. State legislators count on the system to give welfare recipients the training they need to succeed at work. The two-year schools are also expected to absorb a demographic surge of 400,000 students in the next eight years, beyond the 1.4 million students they now educate annually.

The colleges’ ability to serve all, however, has become increasingly impaired by chronic underfunding (the state gives them $3,821 per student compared to a national average of $6,626) and a leadership structure that has all but ground to a halt.

The problems are particularly glaring in the Los Angeles Community College District, where Chancellor Bill Segura recently resigned after little more than a year in office, largely out of frustration at politicization and a culture in which “no one’s happy, the issues aren’t solved and everyone becomes angry at everyone else.”

What daunted Segura and his immediate predecessor is the colleges’ system of “shared governance,” which requires community college leaders to consult with elected trustees, myriad unions and faculty boards before making even the smallest decisions. Legislators can help by giving college leaders more leeway to deviate from the state’s excessively detailed education code. But the root problem is the dominance of faculty boards often more concerned with protecting jobs than with educational problems. “The boards are now making decisions with much more of an employee bias than a student bias,” said William E. Norlund, president of Los Angeles Mission College and a district employee for 30 years. Faculty members at Los Angeles Southwest College, for instance, all but halted efforts to add English-as-a-second-language courses even when Latino enrollment grew from 2% to 50%, largely because their jobs would change.

Legislators should explore long-term solutions like eliminating the college districts and elected trustees altogether, leaving management to the college presidents and a statewide chancellor and governing board, a more coherent structure comparable to the Cal State and UC systems. But legislators can effect change now by basing some funding on a district’s success at meeting educational goals, including improving their transfer rates to UC and Cal State schools and the percentage of students who complete their courses. Currently, the state pays colleges as much for students who drop out after five week as for students who complete a course.

Last year, eight out of nine campuses in the Los Angeles district had deficits and many had to slash up to a quarter of their courses to cut costs--this despite a 15% state funding increase that enabled other districts to avoid drastic cuts. The Los Angeles board of trustees then granted some of the district’s top administrators a 12% salary increase, made the raises 12 months retroactive and refused to divulge exactly what some top administrators were paid.

It is this sheer absence of faculty and administrative accountability that California’s present and would-be leaders will need to address before the state’s 107 community colleges, the workhorses of higher education, can respond to the mounting educational needs at their doors.

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Revenue Gap

State funding per student of public 2-year colleges, 1996-97

Source: California Post Secondary

Education Commission, National Assn. of Jr. Colleges