By Nanette Asimov

During World War II, there was food rationing. In 2012, California’s community college leaders are poised to approve education rationing for thousands of students.

The proposal is controversial, with many students and educators critical of a shakeout that could end free courses offered for generations, including classes such as music appreciation and memoir writing. Also squeezed out would be students who linger at college for years, sampling one class after another.

The problem is as basic as a butter shortage. Essential classes are in critically short supply as the state’s economic crisis lumbers on. Last year, 137,000 students couldn’t get into at least one class they needed, including first-year English and math. And many who are entitled to financial aid never apply for it because there aren’t enough counselors to help them navigate the complex process.

60% dropout rate

The result is a dropout rate of 60 percent among students who expect to transfer to a four-year university or earn a vocational certificate, according to a 2010 study by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy in Sacramento.

Fixing the problem will require overhauling the vast community college system, according to a task force of 20 academics and college advocates who have wrestled with the issue for a year. Established by the Legislature in 2010, the Student Success Task Force wants campuses to do a better job of helping students reach academic goals, and it wants students to move more quickly and efficiently through school.

But it won’t be done with more money. Lawmakers cut $502 million this year from the system’s $5.9 billion budget, on top of hundreds of millions withheld since 2009.

Instead, the task force wants to change how colleges spend the money they already have. Or, as Chancellor Jack Scott plainly put it, “It’s not joyful to have to ration.”

The backbone of the panel’s 22 recommendations is to focus community college resources on students seeking degrees or vocational certificates. All students should have an education plan and make steady progress on it.

Those who don’t would lose registration priority. Those who qualify for a tuition waiver — 47 percent of students — would lose it if they are unfocused and take too many random classes.

“The more directed a student is, the more likely they are to complete their goals,” Scott said. “This is pretty common sense.”

Many agree, including Steve Ngo, a City College of San Francisco trustee who calls it a civil rights issue.

“If students are not even getting basic English and math, they’ll be stuck in poverty,” Ngo said. “These recommendations focus course offerings on student needs.”

Some may be shut out

Yet many others — including students, instructors, administrators and Ngo’s colleagues on the City College board – fear the proposals would harm students who fall outside the new priorities.

“The door will shut for everyone else except for the two-year transfer students,” said Joe Fitzgerald, a City College student and editor of the campus paper, the Guardsman.

Fitzgerald has been at the college seven years, many of them spent learning to be a successful student, he said. Like many others, he sees community college as an academic refuge for students who can’t or prefer not to barrel through school.

Rather than ration education, he and other critics say college leaders should join efforts to raise more revenue for education.

“California needs to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes,” said John Rizzo, president of the City College Board of Trustees. “Oil (extraction) needs to be taxed like it is in every other state.”

California’s college system is the nation’s largest, with 112 campuses and a mandate to admit “any student capable of benefiting from instruction,” according to the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, established in 1960. Its main mission is to provide academic and vocational instruction “through the first two years of undergraduate education.”

The plan also points to colleges’ role in providing remedial classes, community service courses, workforce training and free, noncredit classes, including English as a Second Language.

Last spring, 203,500 students statewide took noncredit classes, and 1.5 million took classes for credit.

Fee waiver overhaul

Nearly half of students taking classes for credit are poor enough to qualify for a waiver of fees: $540 a semester for a full load of 15 credits, at $36 a credit. The price rises to $46 next summer.

The task force wants to rescind fee waivers after students accumulate 110 credits, well beyond the 60 required for transfer. At City College, for example, 12 percent of students with fee waivers had at least 110 credits last spring, or 1,917 students.

“You shouldn’t be a professional student,” said Scott, the state chancellor. “You’re taking up space needed by first-time students.”

But complaints that such a policy would unfairly punish low-income students led the panel to leave the ultimate decision on fee waivers up to individual campuses.

End free classes

Task force members also want colleges to stop spending money on free enrichment classes. They don’t mean those that teach job skills, English acquisition, or help students get a degree. Colleges spent $134 million on those last year, and they will continue.

They’re talking about the kind of class that Norma Miller, 86, credits with saving her life.

“I was ready to just give up,” said Miller, a retired teacher. She’d had a health scare. Three close friends died. She entered a period of decline in which she lost her sense of time and felt, as she put it, “a sense of desperation.”

A doctor recommended that she get out in the world. The senior center offered bingo, but it wasn’t her style. She tried concerts, lectures, even a therapy group. None seemed to help.

Then Miller found the Life Review class in the Older Adults Department at City College, taught by Shelley Glazer, an expert on aging. With a dozen others in her age group, Miller spent this fall reflecting on her life, learning to write about it and considering the future.

“I actually sat down and did some writing,” Miller said. “I actually did it! It was shocking to me. I’m learning to get up and allow myself to think about something other than myself.

“If I lost this class, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Community colleges spent $102 million on such classes last year — the same amount the state cut from colleges’ budget this month.

“I was a college president for 21 years,” said Peter MacDougall, chairman of the task force. “I’d have older adults come in and say, ‘This astronomy course is wonderful!’ I never had the feeling we were denying access to other students. I’m sorry to say that that’s not the place we’re in today.”

Centralize testing

At first the task force recommended changing state law to prevent colleges from spending public funds on such classes. But a public outcry led the panel to soften that stance. Now it directs colleges to verify that funds are spent only on classes that “advance student education plans” and says the law should only change “if necessary.”

The panel also recommends strengthening the power of the state chancellor and implementing centralized testing. The community college system’s Board of Governors will vote on the ideas at its meeting Jan. 9 and 10 in Room 4203 of the state Capitol, 10th Street and Capitol Mall in Sacramento.

— Reach Nanette Asimov at [email protected]

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