Leaning on Community Colleges

On Campus
January/February 2012
Feature Story

America's higher ed workhorse weathers swelling enrollment and diminishing funds.

America's community colleges are hurting. Faced with the double whammy of increased enrollments and decreased funding, they are scrambling to serve more students with less—and experiencing varying degrees of success.

In California, class availability is so limited, and demand so great, that administrators turned 250,000 students away this past fall.

At the City University of New York, tuition went up by $300 to span the gap in state funding, and students are taking to the streets in protest. In fact, many of the Occupy Wall Street participants—in cities from Washington, D.C., to Florida—have made rising tuition a symbol of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and in November, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign was launched (see related story, page 2).

At many colleges, staff are faced with cuts and cancellations in counseling, athletics, summer enrichment and research programs. Faculty are overenrolling their own classes so students, limited by fewer course sections, can get the credits they need to graduate. Other professors have stopped requiring textbooks, replacing them with online handouts so their students, burdened by rising tuition, can save money.

Multiple roles

Community colleges draw in myriad people, for a variety of reasons. They are at once a liberal arts head start for students on their way to four-year colleges, and a job training ground for students more interested in job-specific skills. They provide professional development for people who want to excel in their already-established careers, a testing ground for those exploring new fields of work, and a place for new experiences among people dabbling in everything from art to zoo keeping.

On one leading community college website, students can click on any of five goals: earn a degree, graduate and transfer, improve job skills, change career or continue education. Classes range from liberal arts offerings like microbiology, organic chemistry and sociocultural anthropology, to career-specific programs in physical therapy, aerospace engineering and automotive technology.

Mounting pressure

Increasingly, the nation is depending on these vibrant centers of learning to train and educate middle- and lower-income students—a category that is growing as the economy continues to teeter. President Obama has mentioned community colleges frequently as promising incubators that can lift people out of poverty and into the workforce, strengthening the country as a whole. In 2010, he challenged the nation to graduate 5 million more community college students over the next decade. This fall, Obama's proposed jobs legislation included $5 billion for infrastructure improvements at the two-year institutions.

These actions are in keeping with a natural migration to community colleges. When the economy began to falter, community colleges reflected an opposite trend: Enrollment increased as newly out-of-work students signed up for classes that could help equip them to win jobs in a competitive market. "Community colleges usually [experience] the inverse of what the economic situation is in the country," says Randy Barnette, chief of staff for the Cook County College Teachers Union in Chicago. Enrollment goes up when the economy goes down.

The flood of students is beginning to ebb, but only slightly. "Up until just recently, they've been bulging at the seams," says Barnette. "Lately we've started to see a slow decline, which is a result of people giving up on the economy." Still, increases over the last few years far outpace the drop.

According to the American Association of Community Colleges, enrollment went down by 3.2 percent in 2010, but rose 11 percent in 2009. Over the previous two-year period, it rose 17 percent. Total enrollment for fall of 2010 was a whopping 8.2 million; community colleges typically enroll 44 percent of all undergraduates enrolled in nonprofit higher education.

Funding shortfalls

All of this would be good news—community colleges are popular and thriving—if the colleges had the resources to support that sort of migration. But they don't. The Delta Cost Project report "Trends in College Spending: 1999-2009," released in September 2011, shows that "community colleges bore the brunt" of the higher education cuts that have become so ubiquitous across the nation.

"I don't think there has been a raise in the community college budgets since about 2005," says Barnette, adding that Illinois is no longer able to keep its promise to fund one-third of community college costs (while tuition and local property tax split the other two-thirds). The trend to increase tuition has gone national: It's up 8.7 percent nationally, the highest increase in any sector of higher education. In California, community college tuition more than doubled since 2008. In Minnesota, "The funding model has been inverted," says Greg Mulcahy, president of Minnesota State College Faculty, the statewide two-year faculty union: Student tuition now covers more of the cost of attending community college than state funds do, exactly the opposite of past ratios. (Despite legislation indicating the state will pay 67 percent of community college costs, Mulcahy says students currently pay 60 percent and the state contributes 40 percent.)

Those who are able to pay tuition sometimes make other sacrifices. At North Seattle Community College, art instructor Michelle Kelly remembers one student who didn't have $10 for a glue gun he needed for a class project. She bought the tool for him, then kept it to loan to the next needy student. "I've got kids who are couch surfing," she says. "They're homeless."

Even the City University of New York, which students attended free of charge until the 1970s, has endured tuition increases. Students protested in August, and again in November, insisting the administration either has the money to avoid bumping up student costs, or hasn't pushed the government hard enough to provide sufficient funding.

Funding is also failing to adequately staff courses and provide the space needed to hold them, so students are turned away from the classes they need to graduate. Eighty-six of 267 colleges surveyed by the AACC couldn't enroll every eligible student because of "inadequate financial support, limited physical capacity and insufficient staff."

"We've never seen anything like this," says Carl Friedlander, president of the California Federation of Teachers Community College Council. "For several years, there have been students who couldn't find all the classes they needed. Now we have this new phenomenon that students can't find any classes."

"I automatically overload my classes every quarter," admits Kelly, at North Seattle. Not long ago, her classes were typically 12 students; now she has 20 or 25 students, courses fill before the quarter starts, and there's a waiting list.

At the City College of San Francisco, health professor Briahn Kelly-Brennan saves money by using online handouts to replace expensive textbooks, and shortens exams so students don't have to buy as many Scantron test forms. She even grows her own food for class cooking demonstrations.

The Delta Cost Project report lists a litany of other, more macro-oriented shortcuts schools have taken to weather the poor economy, including deferred maintenance; diminished administrative salaries; and cuts to research, public service, institutional support, information technology and public safety. Salaries are frozen; hiring has all but stopped.

"It's very scary," says Friedlander. "It's really the whole higher education system falling apart from these pressures."

Working to find a solution

It's clear the nation depends on community colleges, but defending their value in the face of continuing competition for state dollars is no small challenge.

Nevertheless, that is the AFT's commitment. "Our focus is on how we can generate more revenue for the state, so that these cuts can be mitigated and we can preserve what's historically been one of the most admired systems of higher education in the world," says Friedlander. The California Federation of Teachers is working with other community organizations to develop a ballot initiative designed to fill the gap between "what we need and what we have right now," he says. The CFT-sponsored measure would raise $6 billion by increasing the marginal tax rate on income over $1 million by 3 percent and on income over $2 million by 5 percent.

Similar efforts to find more revenue are under way in other states, and nationally, the AFT continues to support legislation that would fund infrastructure improvements at community colleges, protect financial aid, and prevent abuse of federal aid by for-profit colleges and universities (see page 7 for more on this issue).

"The sad part is that [diminished funding] is all happening at a moment when demand for community college education continues to grow," says Friedlander. "Here we are cutting classes and raising fees, and enrollment continues to rise because people are so desperate."

The end result could reach much further than community college campuses. "Instead of people completing certificates or degrees and moving into better positions, paying more taxes," says Friedlander, "you're going to have more people, with lower revenue generated, making demands on the social safety network, because people can't move through the college system."

While faculty and staff work to maintain as much of the community college experience as they can, the AFT will continue to push to preserve the funding that allows their efforts to reach as many students as possible.