Loosen Reins on Colleges

California’s 107 community colleges are the worker bees of the state’s higher education system. Unlike their glamorous cousin, the University of California system, or even the workaday Cal State system, the community colleges are expected to fix society’s problems as well as prepare students to go on to four-year colleges. The community colleges are charged with teaching skills that public high schools failed to impart, training welfare recipients for work and helping displaced workers learn skills demanded by the rapidly changing world economy.

This week, the colleges’ charge grew even greater with the passage of a bill by Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) that asks the system to train students for work in particular fields--namely nursing, multimedia and biotechnology.

Unfortunately, Sacramento’s directives are not always followed by dollars. The state’s per-student community college funding lags $2,000 behind the national average. It’s some help that the Legislature has voted to add $57 million to the governor’s budget for the colleges, mostly for state community college Chancellor Tom Nussbaum’s Partnership for Excellence program. The state’s funding formula, however, is based on the ratio of students to the local populations, which unfairly burdens large urban districts like Los Angeles.

The L.A. district, whose enrollment in its nine colleges declined from 140,000 to 100,000 in the last decade, deserves some blame, having failed to offer high-demand courses at times convenient for working students. But it began sweeping reforms last year and is now poised to accelerate them with this week’s election of two capable leaders--Mona Field and Sylvia Scott-Hayes--to its governing board and next week’s installation of a new chancellor, Marshall Drummond. It should not be saddled with punishments aimed at past mismanagement or caused by state policies like a tuition hike that disproportionately hurt urban districts with relatively high numbers of low-income students. Nussbaum should reward districts on a wider basis, including annual enrollment gains.

Meanwhile, Nussbaum should cast a skeptical eye on Gov. Gray Davis’ request that the colleges devote new revenues to increasing transfers to Cal State and UC. Community college districts should be free to determine how they can best serve students. Sometimes that means preparation for a bachelor’s degree or more. Other times, the best answer might be two-year training in skills that regional economies demand, as Cerritos College is doing by training machinists.

Community college reforms have been stymied in the last decade by petty infighting between faculty-dominated local districts and state leaders wanting autocratic control. Such narrow-minded jockeying for power is destructive. The system should serve as a ladder to better lives. That focus on upward economic mobility doubled the state’s community college enrollment during the Great Depression and increased it again eightfold in the two decades following World War II. Given a common focus on student achievement, there’s no reason why urban community colleges can’t thrive again.