Are we shutting her out? Dual degree and transfer agreements between state four-year and community colleges were once an open door to universal access. Now, for many, those doors may be closing

University Business, May, 2004 by Rebecca Sausner

Of course, here again, state budget shortfalls are a primary catalyst for restricting enrollment and transfers; close behind is the baby boom echo--shorthand for the 20 percent surge in the college enrollment expected in the U.S. between 1998 and 2010. These factors, combined with underlying changes in the education landscape in the U.S., has meant that students are being shut out of both community cortege and senior cortege classrooms. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (www.highereducation.org) estimates that some 250,000 students were unable to enroll in college this fall because of rising tuition or restricted enrollments. And because community colleges enroll 46 percent of all African-American undergraduate students and 55 percent of art Hispanic students, there is also the question of whether poor and minority students will suffer most from the situation.

"The combination of the down economy and the baby boom echo has created the perfect storm in higher education," says Mark David Milliron, president and CEO of the League for Innovation in the Community College (www.league.org). "We're at a time when the role of community colleges and transfer education has never been as valued.... The challenge, of course, has been the money."

California (which, for the first time in the state's history recalled a sitting governor, Gray Davis, and voted in actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger to rescue the state from its colossal budget woes) is now the prime example of precisely how dramatically a troubled economy can overtly restrict access to higher education. Schwarzenegger's recently proposed state budget effectively freezes enrollment numbers in the University of California and California State University systems. It requires each to divert (in an as yet unspecified manner) 10 percent of incoming freshmen into dual admissions programs at community colleges, where the state would pick up the tuition tab for the first two years (a markedly tower tab than the one they'd pick up at the four-year publics) before the students complete their undergrad degrees at UC or CSU. [The proposal was still in debate at press time.] The community colleges would be given funds to increase enrollment slightly, but their students would face a 40 percent fee increase, from $18 to $26 per unit. Analysts say the tack of growth in the UC and CSU systems--along with the diversion of an estimated 8,000 freshmen to community colleges--would mean that, art told, more than 22,000 students who would be eligible to enter the senior corteges could be shut out due to a trickle-down effect.

"We have a genuine policy problem because, without question, those students from UC and CSU will take seats from the traditional community college students," confesses Scott Lay, budget director for the Community College League of California (www.ccleague.org). "Those who were going to be at UC are generally more ready to tackle their higher education, it's going to be a kind of survival of the fittest."