Funding Community Colleges Is Crucial to California’s Prosperity

The young man was standing at the back of the protest rally holding a sign that proclaimed his grassy spot in Capitol Park to be “L.A. City College” territory. He kept on holding the sign -- holding it high -- through several speeches. Finally, I walked over to see what he was about.

“Our college is terrible,” he asserted. “There’s not enough janitors. Toilets are overflowing. We don’t have a cafeteria.... We’ve got the oldest chemistry class in California.... It’s a horrible place to try to learn.”

Tsekani Burrell -- “My mom gave me a Swahili name” -- is one of California’s 1.7 million community college students. He’s not untypical. Age 23, he has bounced around -- in school and out, held various jobs to “provide for basic needs” -- and now works at UPS while attending LACC. He lives in a downtown “slum motel.”

He needs a college degree, Burrell said, because “that’s the way the world is going.”

He rode a chartered bus up from L.A. with fellow students to protest Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposals. The students’ target was the governor’s plan to raise community college fees by 44%, from $18 per unit to $26. That’s on top of last year’s hike -- they call it “sticker shock” -- of 64%, from $11 to $18.

Schwarzenegger aides point out that 37% of the students get their fees waived because they’re poor, and say the proposed higher fees would qualify more for federal aid.

“It’s a fee increase on the middle class,” countered Celina Luna, 24, an anthropology major at El Camino College, who hopes to attend USC. She said her dad, a San Pedro longshoreman, supports four college students and every dollar is a struggle.

Luna’s family would be particularly hard-hit by Schwarzenegger because her mother -- a high school English language teacher laid off by budget cuts -- is attending Harbor College, trying to learn a new profession. But she’d have to pay $50 per unit under the governor’s proposal because she already has a BA.

Burrell, Luna and others I talked to at the rally of several thousand Monday represented a cross section of California’s community college population: financially struggling kids who must live at home before transferring to a university, high school goof-offs asking for a second chance, laid-off adults seeking new job skills, young people looking for a rung on a ladder.

Luna is secretary of the California Student Assn. of Community Colleges, which organized the rally. Like many -- including the students’ professional representatives in Sacramento -- she complained about the fee hike because it’s a simple, very visible target. But a much bigger gripe is the overall deterioration of community colleges as Sacramento has struggled to balance budgets without raising taxes. Many courses have been canceled and students turned away.

Because of course cuts and fee hikes, the community colleges estimate, 175,000 students have dropped out.

When school started last fall, Luna said, “it was horrible when you walked down the hallway -- yellow tags on doors saying courses were closed, students stumbling around trying to find new classes. Fees going up, services being cut.”

Recently, the Public Policy Institute of California, in a report by Patrick J. Murphy, opined that higher fees would be OK. California still has the lowest fees in the nation, after all. But the extra money should be kept on campus, not sent to Sacramento as Schwarzenegger proposes: “Students should be asked to pay more for their education, not pay off the state’s deficit.”

The PPIC also said that Sacramento “has repeatedly ... shortchanged the community colleges, apparently with little political cost.”

That’s because the two-year colleges lack the prestige and political clout of the two university systems, CSU and UC.

So the big fight being waged by community colleges is over something esoteric: “The Split.”

State law calls for community colleges to receive a 10.9% split of Proposition 98 funds. But the Legislature each year cuts them a smaller slice so K-12 schools can get more. Schwarzenegger this year is proposing 10% for community colleges, about 90% for K-12.

Each one-tenth of 1% represents $50 million. That’s why college instructors at the rally wore red T-shirts with big letters declaring: “It’s All About the Split.”

“Community colleges have been left in the dust,” says Mark Drummond, the system’s chancellor. “We’re just simply not getting the job done for training the future workforce.”

This should be the critical factor for California’s new governor, a onetime Santa Monica Community College student. A good business climate includes the opportunity for an affordable, quality education. It produces not only a skilled workforce but affluent consumers.

It helped California grow and prosper. These days, we’re mostly just growing.

“Right now, of all the metropolitan areas in the United States, L.A. probably has the least well-educated workforce,” says George Kieffer, chairman of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce. “It discourages business from moving into the state and makes it difficult to retain businesses already here. It continues to develop an underclass.”

Schwarzenegger has been saying that “California is open for business.” He’d get more takers if college doors weren’t closing on the likes of Tsekani Burrell and Celina Luna.

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George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com. Read previous columns at

latimes.com/skelton.