The College Fix

From Inside Higher Ed:

In many states in recent years, summer enrollments have gone way up at public institutions, as students who struggle to get into sections during the regular academic year take advantage of greater availability in the summer. But in California, higher education budgets are so tight that many community colleges have cut way back on summer programs — despite student demand, The Los Angeles Timesreported. Eight community college campuses plan no summer courses this year, and the community college system’s summer enrollment was down 43 percent from 2008 to 2011. A survey by Santa Monica College found that, at 15 community colleges in the Los Angeles area, only one-third of the courses offered in 2008 are going to be offered this year, representing a loss of 6,000 teaching assignments and 168,000 classroom seats.

This is a shame, because unlike traditional public colleges, community colleges are actually affordable alternatives for students who don’t want to spend the next decade in debt. The big question here is how: How has California found itself in the situation where it cannot pay to keep running some of its most desirable programs? Is it because California is the poster child for austerity, cruelly cutting all funding to higher education and the public sector in general? Or is it because bloated, bureaucratic public universities gobbled up greater and greater helpings of the people of California’s money and funneled it into state-of-the-art renovations and administrative salaries? Did the state of California slowly starve public universities, or did it fill them up to the point of instability?

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