Tough Times Force Cuts at 2-Year Colleges

Education: Applications increase as budgets shrivel. Campuses are turning students away.

By STUART SILVERSTEIN and REBECCA TROUNSON Times Staff Writers

Los Angeles Times        July 22, 2002

To cope with soaring enrollments and tightening budgets, many community colleges in California and across the nation are cutting classes and turning away students.

The cutbacks are being made just as more students head to community colleges in Los Angeles and elsewhere because of layoffs, rising tuitions at public universities and a boom in the number of college-age youths.

"Making cuts at these colleges is like eating our seed corn," said George Boggs, president of the nonprofit American Assn. of Community Colleges, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group for the two-year colleges.

"Education is crucial" to fighting unemployment and strengthening the economy, Boggs said. "And we shouldn't be starving the solution."

With so many states facing budget shortfalls this year, public four-year institutions are struggling. Many have imposed or are considering cutbacks such as tuition increases and enrollment caps. But tough times hit especially hard at community colleges, which rely more heavily on state funding than their four-year counterparts, and with tighter budgets, have fewer options for cuts.

So far, California's community college and public university systems have not proposed higher fees for residents for the coming year, despite a $23.6-billion gap in the state budget. But with more and more students heading their way, community colleges say they must try to limit enrollment.

Educators say denying access to students is wrenching for these schools, which are dedicated to providing higher education, at low cost, to virtually all comers.

"Its sort of a moral imperative for us," said Mark Drummond, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, where enrollment is growing about 10% a year. "We know that the future of someone who doesn't attend college is not very good."

The state's 108 community colleges enrolled an estimated 1.68 million students last year, the most ever and an increase of 6% from the year before, according to the state chancellor's office.

The budget pending before the Legislature includes enough for enrollment growth of 3%. Administrators are not waiting for its passage to make cuts.

"We know we're not going to get more," said California Community Colleges Chancellor Thomas J. Nussbaum.

In Los Angeles, Drummond said, administrators decided in May to eliminate about 5% of the planned summer school courses at the district' s nine campuses. He said further reductions of 5% to 10% are in the works for the fall.

Fewer course offerings mean hardship for such students as Allen Camilo, a former United Airlines reservations agent who was laid off when the industry slumped after Sept. 11. Like many other laid-off workers, Camilo, 32, went back to school, hoping more education might protect him against future downturns.

Camilo said he has made steady progress since enrolling at Los Angeles City College, but was frustrated when he couldn't get into an English composition course this summer. He took the class online, reluctantly.

"It's not the same," Camilo said of the online class. "But 60 students signed up, and there were 20 of us who couldn!t get in. We dicn't have this problem before."

Nationwide, community college enrollment is tough to gauge with certainty; the schools' enrollment levels are more volatile than those of four-year colleges, and national education figures often lag by more than a year. The most recent numbers show that, in the fall of 1999, 5.3 million students were enrolled at 1, 151 accredited two-year colleges, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But Boggs and many community college officials say accounts from numerous campuses point to substantial enrollment increases since then.

Besides a weak job market that is prodding many adults to return to school to expand their skills, the children of baby boomers now are heading to college in great numbers, along with the children of new immigrants.

At the same time, growing numbers of recent high school graduates are choosing to start their studies at community colleges rather than at more expensive four-year schools.

"Community colleges are really in a double crunch--trying to deal with booming demand just as the money goes down," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose.

The effects are far-ranging. In Florida, for instance, the community college system enrolled 10% more students last year than in the year before, said David Armstrong, the system's executive director.

Armstrong said the Florida system, one of the nation's largest, managed to avoid budget reductions for

the fall but had to raise tuition by 2%.

"If this continues--and we're projecting a 7% enrollment growth for this year too--I don't know what we'll do," Armstrong said.

In Illinois, at one of the nation's biggest community college campuses, College of DuPage near Chicago, administrators are "capping" classes for the fall--limiting class sections and cutting those with lower head counts.

Even so, enrollment is expected to rise to 35,000 this fall, up about 10% in the last five years, said DuPage spokesman William Troller.

At the same time, a state budget squeeze has prompted the school to increase tuition $2 per unit--to $39--for the summer session, and in the biggest single increase in the school's history, raise it another $4 per unit for the fall.

Still, residents of the DuPage district who attend school full time will pay $2,064 in tuition and fees next year, far less than they would at competing four-year schools.

Tess Glancey, who graduated from high school in June, was considering attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

But Glancey, 17, said the university's higher cost--especially after a recent 13% tuition increase for out-of-state students for next year--has persuaded her to live at home and spend her first two years at DuPage, where she has a full-tuition scholarship.

In California, community colleges enrolled record numbers last year, and exceeded enrollment caps by about 75,000 students statewide, according to Nussbaum.

"All over the state, people were being squeezed out of the work force, and they were coming to community colleges," Nussbaum said.

"All of a sudden, we had thousands of extra students and no money from the state to pay for them."

Urban districts such as Los Angeles--which had about 22,000 of these "unfunded" students among its 135,000 total last year--were the ones most severely affected, officials said.

Nussbaum and other community college leaders hope to persuade legislators to fund more realistic levels of enrollment next year.

In the meantime, they say, the state's most crowded campuses have little choice but to reduce course offerings, effectively turning students away.

"We know we're not going to be able to serve all the students who want to come here," said Darroch "Rocky" Young, president of Pierce College in Woodland ffills, which is part of the Los Angeles district. "If s hard to be an educator, and have people who want to be educated, and have to turn them away. Ifs hard for my soul."

Young said Pierce had 4,000 unfunded students last year, or 22% of its student body. Similarly, Los Angeles City College had about 4,400 unfunded students last year out of 18,000 in its total enrollment.

President Mary Spangler said the school had been forced to cut its summer class schedule and that it planned to reduce classes further in the fall.

Other hard-hit colleges are hiring part-time instructors instead of full-time faculty members, increasing class sizes and digging into reserves. But longer-term solutions have to be found, Nussbaum said.

"We can step up to the plate for one year, or maybe two years," the chancellor said. "But it's not a sustainable strategy or a quality strategy for our system in the long term."