WSJ on CA state colleges

LOS ANGELES -- Educators from around the world used to flock to California to see what made its vaunted higher-education system tick. Now the state's public colleges are in crisis, buffeted by the forces plunging California into economic and political turmoil.

The state's budget woes have prompted funding cuts and fee increases at the schools, and threaten to inflict even deeper wounds next year. At the same time, the schools are being swamped by a wave of new students -- the children of baby boomers and those of Latino and Asian immigrants who arrived in record numbers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Among the hardest hit have been the state's community colleges, which many low-income students use as a stepping stone to better jobs and a better life. Many classes are full at these schools, others have been canceled, and enrollment fees have rocketed 64% higher, threatening to lock out many poor students.

And the woes at the state's other school systems promise more trouble for the community colleges. As fees shot up 30% at the California State University and University of California colleges, more students are expected to flock to the already-overburdened community schools. Things are expected to get even worse next spring, when CSU plans to slash enrollment growth nearly in half, denying admission to as many as 20,000 students. Six of its 23 campuses won't accept any freshmen or transfer students at all.

At City College of San Francisco, immigrants or their children constitute more than one-half the school's bulging enrollment of about 100,000 students. Nga Nguyen is a 45-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who moved to the U.S. with her husband five years ago. She has been attending classes at the community college as part of a two-year program to become a pharmaceutical technician.

But Ms. Nguyen, a night-shift waitress who shares a cramped one-bedroom apartment with her husband and two children, says she may have to extend her program by an extra year because of recent budget hits. The school closed 40% of its English-as-a-second-language classes this summer, a program used by many immigrants to hone English-writing skills. "I tried to get in one of the classes, but they were all full," she says.

City College officials express frustration at the cuts, and say they may hold serious consequences for California's economy. By making it more difficult for strapped students to climb up from their menial jobs, says school trustee Julio Ramos, employers may be forced to seek more workers through visa programs or by outsourcing jobs overseas.

Now the California colleges have become a political football in the state's overheated gubernatorial contest. As 134 candidates vie to replace Gov. Gray Davis in the Oct. 7 recall election, community colleges are a big part of the debate.

Cruz Bustamante, the state's lieutenant governor and the leading Democratic contender, said last week that if he were elected he would roll back fee increases at the community colleges and open up more classes to meet demand. He would pay for the proposed changes with proceeds from a $12 billion revenue-raising plan, including $8 billion in higher taxes.

Mr. Bustamante himself is a product of the community-college system. He enrolled first at Fresno City College, a short drive from his hometown of San Joaquin. But jobs, and his political career, prevented him from finishing his four-year degree. The lieutenant governor, now 50, was finally awarded his bachelor of arts from California State University at Fresno earlier this year, after taking Internet classes to help complete the few credits he needed.

"Our community colleges have been the source of California's economic growth and prosperity," Mr. Bustamante said in his opening campaign speech last week. "They allow millions of people to become a part of the best-trained, most productive work force in America."

The leading Republican candidate, 56-year-old actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is also familiar with the California community colleges: He attended three of them simultaneously in the Los Angeles area soon after arriving in this country from Austria, according to a spokeswoman. He has pledged not to make any more cuts to education in general but hasn't said whether he would roll back cuts. Another Republican candidate, former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, says he would boost spending in colleges and other schools if state revenue rose sufficiently under his proposed spending caps.

California boasts that its colleges -- the 108 community schools, 23 CSU campuses and 10 UC campuses -- make up the largest system of higher education anywhere in the world. Last fall, roughly 1.6 million students, or 70% of all those in the state's public higher-education system, attended one of the 108 community colleges.

Unlike the state's four-year universities, the community colleges don't have selective admissions policies. Historically, their doors have been open to any state resident over 18 who pays a modest fee.

Even with higher fees, community colleges are still a bargain for many students. Community schools cost full-time students about $468 a year, compared with $2,566 for CSU and $5,537 for UC. The fees are several times higher for students who aren't California residents. Over the years, many students who couldn't afford four years at CSU or UC have spent two years at a community college before transferring to another system.

The funding reductions for community colleges signed by Gov. Davis in July aren't as devastating as many feared. Spending from the general fund, which pays for education and other social programs, was cut by 9.4%, or about $250 million. But those cuts were rolled back to $86.8 million, or 1.7%, after fees were raised 64% and property-tax forecasts showed higher-than-expected revenue growth.

But that doesn't tell the true story, says Robert Turnage, the community-college system's vice chancellor for fiscal policy. Even with the smaller budget cut, funding per student has dropped nearly 7% over the past two years, he says. Meanwhile, the legislature has said it doesn't plan to support enrollment growth at the state's universities in the fiscal 2005 budget, which will drive more students into the community colleges.

"That is quite startling when you consider the history of California, its past commitment to higher education" and the "tidal wave" of expected enrollments in this decade, Mr. Turnage says. "If we look ahead to 2004 and 2005, the prospects aren't bright."

California's famous "Master Plan for Education" was adopted in 1960, when the first round of baby boomers prepared to leave high school. It promised every California student a free college education and kicked off a campus-building boom across the state. The plan was a turning point in higher education in the U.S. and was widely copied in other states and countries. Despite the adoption of fees and other changes over the years, the plan's basic tenets still survive.

Now California is facing another demographic shift. Post-secondary enrollments are projected to increase by 26% in the decade ending in 2011. The children of the baby boomers are reaching college age. So are the children of millions of Mexicans, Filipinos, Salvadorans, Chinese and other immigrants who came to California over the past 20 years.

Josias Dominguez, 19, is a typical first-generation student. His parents left El Salvador and migrated illegally to Los Angeles in 1980. His mother has a sixth-grade education; his father stayed in school somewhat longer. Mr. Dominguez says he has a passion for math and wants to become an electrical engineer. Once he fulfills his general-education credits at West Los Angeles Community College, he hopes to transfer to a four-year university.

"I'm somewhat in poverty because we spend most of our money on the house," he says. After paying his share of groceries and other household expenses, Mr. Dominguez says, he could barely cover his school fees, books and supplies.

The fee increases effective this fall mean he will have to scrape up an additional $336 a year to stay in school. While that's not a huge sum, Mr. Dominguez earns only $7.50 an hour as a parking attendant on the other side of town. It's a long bus ride from home when he can't borrow his mother's car.

Even if he comes up with the money, he may not be able to get the courses he needs. Faculty layoffs at community colleges have resulted in fewer course offerings, effectively blocking students from classes needed to finish a certificate program or earn a degree. Nearly 80% of community-college students work and may drop out if they can't find courses that mesh with their job schedules.

Administrators say the cutbacks are a bigger threat than the fee increases. "Many students who are turned away don't come back," says Sylvia Scott-Hayes, a trustee at the Los Angeles Community College District, which administers nine campuses in Los Angeles.

No one knows what the impact of budget cuts and higher fees will be on overall enrollments of low-income and immigrant students. But there's no doubt that these groups will suffer. "We're facing a train wreck," says David W. Breneman, an economist who has studied higher-education issues and is dean of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. "We're going to lose a significant part of the next generation. I don't know what those folks will do other than very low-wage grunt work."

Many California businesses depend on community colleges to provide a steady flow of skilled workers. Northrop Grumman Corp. says it relies on the schools for computer programmers and engineers, among other positions. "Obviously, anything that happens to disrupt the number of potential employees could have an impact on our efforts to attract and retrain highly skilled workers," said Randy Belote, a spokesman for the Los Angeles-based defense contractor.

One field that is already feeling the pinch is nursing. Community colleges train nearly two-thirds of nurses educated in the state, and there is an acute need for graduates as hospitals scramble to meet strict new staffing standards that take effect in January. But plans to ramp up the number of graduates are slowing due to constraints in hiring faculty. A new nursing program at Los Angeles City College, for instance, will graduate between 26 and 28 new nurses next spring, half as many as originally planned. Hospitals, meanwhile, are recruiting nurses from the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

In California's heavily Hispanic Central Valley, education budget cuts are making it tougher for children of farm workers to pull themselves into the middle class. Alejandra Garcia is a 21-year-old junior at California State University at Fresno, and one of eight children of Mexican-born farm workers Lino and Guadalupe Garcia. They all live under one roof in the town of Madera, about 20 miles north of Fresno at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The combined family household income, which includes two of Ms. Garcia's brothers, is under $30,000 a year, so low that Ms. Garcia was able to qualify for some financial aid to attend classes.

But the economic pressures on her are mounting. Her 61-year-old father, who has worked in the fields of the Central Valley for three decades, recently contracted botulism, apparently through contaminated irrigation water. For several weeks, he has been laid up as the family struggled to get him qualified for state disability payments. In the meantime, the household has lost his $800-a-month income.

Meanwhile, state budget cuts delivered two more hits to the Garcias. Ms. Garcia's 15-year-old brother, Ignacio, had his part-time job tutoring elementary-school students slashed a few weeks ago. Then Ms. Garcia was notified in late July that her $3,000-a-year job at an information desk on the Fresno campus had been eliminated. She says all of this may delay her goal of getting a bachelor's degree in international business.

"We barely make payments on this house as it is, and we don't even have a bank account," says Ms. Garcia, as her mother chokes back tears in the sweltering living room of a five-bedroom home they recently purchased with a low-interest loan. The mortgage payment is about $700 a month. According to the mother, who is 56: "Our big hope is that our children can get a career better than we have. It's why we came here."