EDUCATION APRIL 17, 2012
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By the time the police arrived with the pepper spray, sending throngs of college students choking to the ground, it was clear that Santa Monica College’s plan to raise tuition had gone badly awry.
Days earlier, the trustees of the 31,000-student community college had announced a novel strategy for dealing with the state of California’s latest round of punishing budget cuts. It would open up new sections of perpetually over-subscribed courses like English and Math—but only to students willing to pay four times the standard price. The college’s mostly-minority, low- and middle-income students saw this as an affront to the institution’s bedrock tradition of affordable higher education. They protested, the cops arrived, the pepper spray was deployed, cell-phone videos of screams and chaos were instantly broadcast, the media descended, and in short order the leadership caved and cancelled the plan.
It was, I’m guessing, a bad week for Santa Monica’s president and his board of trustees. But the affair did serve valuable purposes. First, it drew attention to the unconscionable dismantling of California’s once-great system of higher education. More important, it demonstrated exactly what happens when public resources are pulled away. The biggest problem facing many college students is not, as popularly portrayed in the media, the need to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend the college of their choice. It’s the problem of not being able to pay for any college at all, because the only college they can attend refuses to have them.
CALIFORNIA’S SYSTEM of organizing higher education is world-famous. Devised by University of California president Clark Kerr in 1960, the California Master Plan split the state’s higher education institutions into three tiers. At the top, University of California campuses would admit the state’s most academically-promising high school students and employ the nation’s most gifted scholars and researchers. In the middle, the California State University system would enroll the next rung of students and train them in fields like accounting and teaching. At the bottom, the California Community College System would provide two years of low-cost education and the chance to transfer to U.C. or CSU.
This allowed the state to simultaneously support elite research universities and provide open access to the masses—the two overriding goals of American higher education for the last half-century. In many ways, it was a fantastic success. The U.C. system currently contains seven of the 50 best research universities in the world. And between them, CSU and the community colleges enroll more than three million students. In the decades after the Master Plan was adopted, many other states adopted versions of the California three-tier system. To this day, it is the only way most people know how to think about structuring higher education policy at the state level.
Unfortunately, that has masked serious problems with the underlying architecture. It has always been more of a treaty than a plan. In the 1950s, California developed a bad habit of building new universities in whatever district happened to be represented by the most powerful state legislators, instead of where the most students were or would be. And as soon as shovels hit dirt, university leaders began agitating for PhD programs, medical schools, and other accoutrements of elite learning. The Master Plan imposed some order, but the treaty has frayed over time. The CSU and U.C. systems are always fighting for money and prestige.
It was also, in California and elsewhere, a system deliberately designed to discriminate against lower-income students. Community colleges are a distinctly American institution that arose to fulfill a particular need. Migration and economic growth ballooned the population of Sun Belt states the middle of the 20th century at the same time that economic and social trends were driving more people to college. Community colleges were a way to meet that need on the cheap. Students would pay less, but so would the government. In round numbers, California currently spends twice as much per student educating U.C. students as it does on CSU students, and twice as much on CSU students compared to those in community colleges.
As a result, the original promise was never really fulfilled. Community colleges were charged with doing at least three different things—continuing education for adults, job training for local labor markets, and the first two years of a baccalaureate education—while enrolling students who often came from dysfunctional K-12 schools, all with pennies on the research university dollar. In California, community colleges are governed by locally-elected boards that tend to be heavily influenced by faculty labor unions. This combination has produced some startlingly bad results. While nearly half of all American undergraduates are enrolled in a community college (in California, it’s closer to two-thirds), the majority of them fail to get a degree or transfer to a four-year school.
Then came the anti-tax movement and legislation by ballot initiative—two more California innovations—and the subsequent deterioration of state governing institutions. The system was able to kind of, sort of, keep itself together for a while. But after the economic crisis of 2008, the public higher education engine began to seize.
IN THE 2008-2009 school year, California’s community colleges enrolled almost three million students. Demand for higher education is traditionally counter-cyclical—as unemployment rises and new job openings dry up, more people go to college for retraining or as a way of riding out the economic downswing. With their focus on access and employment, community colleges in particular are supposed to play this role.
But instead of expanding capacity to meet surging demand, California did the opposite by cutting funding to two-year schools. Without enough money to maintain buildings and pay professors, the community colleges cut back course offerings. Technically, anyone could still enroll in the institution. They just couldn’t enroll in the actual classes they need to transfer or earn a degree. Overall enrollment dropped by 400,000 students, which is roughly the size of the entire CSU system, and nearly double the number of undergraduates at U.C. Remember: This in a time when community college enrollment should have been going sharply up.
At the same time, CSU began shutting down the two-to-four-year pipeline. Inbound transfers from community colleges dropped by 12,000 students from 2009 to 2010, more than a 20 percent decline. Across the Cal State system, campuses are capping enrollment and reducing the number of courses in which students can enroll.
All of this is happening in a system that already had problems getting students from matriculation to graduation. In a rational world, credits earned at a state’s public two-year institutions would be automatically transferable to the state’s public four-year institutions. That was the whole point of shunting the majority of students into two-year institutions in the first place. In reality, it’s far more complicated and unwieldy. Transfer credits are routinely rejected for arcane and ridiculous reasons. When Jack Scott, the soon-to-be-retired head of the California Community College System first took his job, he discovered that:
...there was a [CSU] campus that required a course in the history of world civilization and didn't accept the history of Western civilization, and 60 miles away was another CSU campus that required the history of Western civilization and wouldn't accept the history of world civilization.
Scott helped push transfer reform through the legislature in 2010. But this kind of problem is still very common in higher education systems nationwide. One investigation found widely varied transfer standards for a single low-level math course, despite the fact that the analysis was limited to the eleven universities within the City University of New York system. A proposal to fix this problem was denounced by faculty, who saw it as an attack on their academic freedom to reject other universities’ classes as they please.
Despite the debilitating dysfunction of the lower-rungs of the public higher education system, the dominant media narrative around the effects budget cuts in California and elsewhere has focused on service reductions and price increases at top-tier places like UC-Berkeley. The Occupy movement, which to its credit brought needed attention to the broad problem of college affordability, was still disproportionately driven by the concerns of middle- and upper-middle class students whose considerable loan burdens were accrued at private colleges and universities. These are legitimate gripes. But in terms of broad impact on social justice and economic competitiveness, they pale beside the hundreds of thousands of anonymous and powerless students who are simply missing from California’s community colleges, and from cash-starved open-access institutions nationwide.
THERE ARE TWO ways to think about how to improve this situation (and they aren’t mutually exclusive). The first is to do more with the same amount of money. Online education is unavoidably a part of this conversation. Higher learning via the Internet isn’t for everyone, but it’s for a lot of people, and it is rapidly improving, as broadband access becomes ubiquitous and educators steadily improve their distance education pedagogy. But it won’t come without controversy. Last fall, a move toward expanding public online offerings in California was denounced by the faculty union, on the grounds that online courses would be less expensive and thus require fewer faculty to teach. The head of the union also announced that he was uninterested in any scholarly evidence about the relative quality of online vs. in-person courses, citing the inherently subjective value of higher education. When interest groups slow progress like this, everyone suffers—not least, because students simply go elsewhere. The top destination for California community college students who can’t transfer into the CSU system is the far more expensive University of Phoenix.
The second strategy is to do more with more money. California doesn’t have to have (and in the long run, can’t have) governing mechanisms that systematically thwart the public interest. States don’t have to give community colleges that enroll the hardest-to-educate students the least amount of money. Desperate stop-gap measures like the Santa Monica College tuition plan might buy a few extra classes, but they also worsen economic injustice and class divisions that are already deeply embedded in the basic structures of state higher education policy. Opening the doors of higher education to ever more Americans is a perpetually unfinished project. But it’s a tragedy that we are simply choosing to watch some of those doors swing shut.
Kevin Carey works for Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
10 comments
It's too late to write anything lengthy on this post for now, but Carey himself constantly reminds us of why he's so poorly suited to write here. Here's the section: "In California, community colleges are governed by locally-elected boards that tend to be heavily influenced by faculty labor unions. This combination has produced some startlingly bad results. While nearly half of all American undergraduates are enrolled in a community college (in California, it’s closer to two-thirds), the majority of them fail to get a degree or transfer to a four-year school. " Yea, right, a union problem. Carey so willingly ignores the fact that community college students are adults. They're not required to there. If you talk to you local community college connected neighbor, you'll find out that if they (students) have family, and quit, they often make a choice to support the family. Also, community college students, most being adults, often wanting to simply make money and relax, decide to work and drink beer. Finally, many in the trades get hired in that trade before they graduate (I'm told that one large computing services company regularly raids the community colleges for technicians and actually encourages them to quit school, claiming the company will provide everything the potential technician needs to know.). If that's not success, I don't know what is. Measuring graduation rates for adult populated schools is dubious at best. Dishonest in Careys case. He's supposed to be the expert in a magazine that's alleged reputation is 'truth telling'.
- jet
April 17, 2012 at 4:47am
That only 10% of students who start community college actually finish community college is nothing new; it's always been that way. What Carey fails to mention is that of the 10% who finish community college, over 90% go on to get a BS or BA degree. And it's always been that way too. That has been the experience in Florida since the community college system was developed in the 1960s. I mention this so readers don’t get the false impression that today’s community college students are slackers as compared to those in the past. But Florida too has experienced a proliferation of four-year state colleges, so many now that I couldn't name them all; by comparison, when I was in school, there were two major state research universities, the Univ. of Florida and Florida State Univ., and two major non-research state universities, the Univ. of South Florida and the Univ of Central Florida, both opened in the 1960s in rapidly growing areas (Tampa and Orlando), and in large part to accommodate the students transferring from the many community colleges (then called junior colleges). Just this year, despite huge budget cuts to state colleges, the powerful state Senator from Lakeland passed a bill to create another state university in Lakeland. And while all these new state universities began as non-research, mostly undergraduate colleges, they soon expanded to include graduate and professional degrees, not to mention intercollegiate athletic programs with expensive facilities and budgets. And who suffers most from this phenomenon: that's right, the community colleges and their students. What's happening in California is happening in Florida, and probably in most other states. Why? Because politicians look at a state university as a magnet not just for students but for jobs, jobs in and around the university provided by employers who locate or re-locate there precisely because of the built-in supply of college graduates. At least that's the theory, a theory that seems to have been proven in Tampa, whose phenomenal growth could not have occurred without the Univ. of South Florida (now the second largest state university, with advanced degree programs ranging from business to engineering to medicine). I have a home in a small town in another southern state, and the local community college recently converted to a four year college. Will two-year community colleges soon become extinct? Maybe. My southern state is unique in that the state funds scholarships at the state universities for any student finishing high school with a B average, the result of which is that many of the "best" high school students, who in the past would have attended prestigious national schools, are now staying in-state to attend the "best" state school, forcing "good" but not the very "best" students, who in the past would have attended the "best" state school, to attend secondary state schools, including recently converted community colleges.
- rayward
April 17, 2012 at 7:43am
I don't know jet. I am a founding member of the hate on kcarey club, but this piece is mostly acceptable. It should focus on the fact that spending is very low for community colleges and spending for state universities have spiralled out of control. Four-year colleges are fine, I think. The main problem we have in the states is that education spending is not well controlled. It's like the health care cost spiral. The system is way too complicated, with the subsidies, grants, and loans, which means that we control costs much more poorly than mainland Europe or ANZAC. We can probably chalk this up to the stupid historical fact that states run their own university systems but have proved unable to fund them adequately with their own tax base. It's not even a situation like Medicaid where the federal government has explicit service requirements that require states to reach certain price points and guarantee cost-free access to the poorest residents. This is sticky wicket because of federalism and I suppose that Obama of all people would love to federalize this area if it could bring lasting solutions to the persistent problems of counter-cyclical state funding, college affordability, college quality, and low graduation rates, which ultimately mean wasted resources for both the college and the student, considering the expense and the fact that student loans can't be cleared in bankruptcy. Obama constantly speaks at community colleges (even if they tend to be just across the river in Annandale, VA) and seems to evince a genuine concern that college be affordable. After all, it's easy to forget that Obama is the first president from the "OMFG college is really expensive ... thanks baby boomers and California tax revolters!" generation. He knows a thing or two about lingering student debt, how to get lost in the undergraduate system (he transferred and thankfully still finished within 4 years), and is reasonably concerned that college provide value for the money when his daughters start at the end of the decade. He reads plenty of letters from people who have college debt problems and yet cannot get the jobs that college education promised. For those reasons, it's vitally important that the piece highlight why solving the problems of college affordability is structurally difficult, the solutions that different states have found at least partially successful, as well as concrete ways for students to stand up for their rights to an education and not a bankruptcy. I know that the Supreme Court has not yet found a right to education in the Constitution, but if every president (except for, say, Santorum) is going to shove it down our throats that college is necessary, we will require that it not be an abstruse monster to make it affordable to all interested comers. And that will require higher tax tax levels. It's a point on which the UK is very stupidly moving away from the socialized guaranteed-issue model of highly affordable education (~$1000 a year when Blair started) to our ridiculous patchwork hydra of a market model (rates there are now closing in on $10,000 thanks to New Labour reforms that the Tories want to double down on--austerity, natch).
- chaitless
April 17, 2012 at 8:35am
Upon reread, I guess I'll move closer to jet. Teaching in community college is skull-crushing work with the occasional possibility of transcendence. This is what I extrapolate from Professor X from "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The Truth About College", as well as my knowledge that of while 2/3 of my high school classmates actually graduated and most (though not all) went on to higher education, about half of these people went straight to community college and this half was certainly not the top half. The archetypal community college student is the kind of student who needs the most attention, help, and financial support on his or her college journey. While kcarey manages to advocate on their behalf in a me too manner to, say, UC students, I can't say that the union of community college instructors is unnecessary or even significantly out of line. It's certainly possible to construct a History of Western Civ course that does not cover 50% of the topics that History of World Civ covers. The bigger problem here is I haven't seen believable research showing online instruction to be superior to classroom instruction and I certainly would have a hard time believing it will work for the academically adrift (of all people). It's the same mentality that foisted 401(k)s and their magic of flexibility on a society where most individuals are just not motivated enough to independently manage their money. I'm not accusing kcarey of finding the solution to another educational policy problem to be busting the unions, but it is telling that he focuses most of his energy on the reduce cost approach (even as he complains that costs are too low!) rather than the increase funding approach. I'd prefer a more credible writer who details exactly how the reduce cost approach will get done and sketch that out on the CSU and UC level. Certainly the fact that students feel room and board is standard means that we already have a means at our disposal if the societal expectations start even slightly to shift away from encouraging students to move halfway across the country to go to college. That said, I'll more likely read such a piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education than here.
- chaitless
April 17, 2012 at 9:19am
I took English 1 at Santa Monica College while I went to UCLA. It was cheap to take a summer class there and take the more important courses at UCLA. Although I was poor, I was just the sort of student they should be charging more for at Santa Monica College. Charge those who don't need to go there more so they can afford to educate those who need it.
- bwickes
April 17, 2012 at 10:43am
I am poster child for California's higher ed failures/successes. Started at UC Berkeley (top level); flunked out; recouped at a L.A. Area JC (bottom level); finished BA at a state college which later became state university); mediocre level. If you hate my comments; love my comments; are utterly indifferent; it's all California's higher education system's fault. Though the cherry on top of the whipped cream is University of Washington's fault, where they foolishly granted me a Masters. I think that was either the nuclear option or the suicide button.
- skahn
April 17, 2012 at 3:54pm
I suppose I am lucky, my wife recently got her LPN degree in a community college in Pa. Not only was it very inexpensive, because of scholarships it cost us nothing, and now that she has a job her job provides tuition re-imbursement while she goes for her RN One other thing, up until recently I was working in the state college system in Oaxaca, they have opened up a great many state colleges in their system, by far most students drop out but most students are also on scholarship. I found the curriculum to be more demanding than my own Pa. state college one. They have 10 semesters, not 5, and more classroom hours, for example they had to have completed 5 levels of English with 5 full contact hours per week. And no way can this type of thing be done online. In fact, outside of English lit or History I really can not see much value in any kind of online learning except as a supplement. Part of my job was to design coursework for the language lab. It was to reinforce already learned material, not as a substitute for real teaching.
- blackton
April 17, 2012 at 8:37pm
Chaitless, some good points. I think that at first glance, the start of the article, simply being an introduction to the development of the California college/university system, would lead one to believe the rest of the article is fairly benign. But as you say, on second reading, paying better attention, the faults at the heart of the article show through. I'll address my concerns in a couple of posts, as longer posts are hard to stay with sometimes. I decided in my first post, that I'd focus on a portion of Carey's article that I'd recently had a discussion about, and is covered in the local media: the type of students that are commonly served by community colleges and how these students feel the system meets their needs. I just felt that slagging unions enroute to making his point detracted from what would have otherwise been a more reasonable argument for supporting funding for community colleges. Regarding Carey's first point, and your focus on, online learning. I caught Charlie Rose last night Monday 4/16/2012. He had four large city mayors attending this weeks Bloomberg Philanthropies mayors conference. Keeping things short, regarding distance work, Rahm Emanuel's comments, though pertaining to work, probably have relevance for distance education. Emanuel describes former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt suggesting that in many cases, workers working apart over distance, wasn't nearly as effective as the same employees working in the same building to solve problems. Rahm was making the case for cities being innovation engines, but given that students are much less confident about their skill set, working together locally in a classroom is probably even more relevant. Meaning that distance eduction will most likely only work for a small subset of the population despite his suggested changes to pedagogy. One other thing to note, that Carey's lack of connection with working class community college learners shows, is that many of them don't use, fear, or much less own a computer. A well read (or intellectually honest) writer, would have noted that, and that even those working class students that do own a computer don't use them much as they don't know how. That's not changing over generations as fast as schools would like. How then, is online learning supposed to serve this group?
- jet
April 17, 2012 at 11:00pm
I also take issue with Carey's knock on academic freedom. It implies that professors are clueless about the needs of their field and that they aren't worthy of making judgements relating to curriculum or having a reasonable disagreement about what's important to succeed in the field. We don't have a Politburo in this country. And we know what happened to the last one that did, despite all the mathematicians, physicists and other intellectual talent that nation had. I mean, in bringing up implied support for CUNY administrators to take over some of the curriculum decision making powers from professors, when has Carey demonstrated that he's better suited to make those choices? I haven't seen it anywhere. Perspectives on curriculum are complicated, Carey seems to want to wave those complications away, as if he knows better. That said, college educators should become more aware of how those perspectives can undermine their own colleges ability to admit students. Carey appears to be incapable of making an honest case.
- jet
April 17, 2012 at 11:16pm
I'm a serial critic of Carey's articles, but this one struck me as fair. Carey clearly outlines the problem, based in reduced funding, and then suggests two solutions, online learning and more funding. While I don't necessarily agree that online learning is either cost-effective or educationally effective, that solution does attempt to address the funding issue. The fact that we as commentators are arguing about unions (only briefly mentioned by Carey) and over-reacting to the single paragraph about online learning suggests problems with our own obsessions rather than the facts that Carey lays out.
- polcereal
April 18, 2012 at 4:25pm