AFT On Campus
January/February 2012

Feature Story
Leaning on Community Colleges

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

America’s community collegesare 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.

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