Obama Community College Proposal May Not Be Enough

Will $12B in federal funds work to cause an additional five million students to graduate from community colleges by 2020? Experts say that increased state and local funding is also needed:

''It's great that people are coming back to community colleges to get trained, but a student only brings about a third of the cost of their tuition.''

Ivy Tech Community College President Thomas Snyder says his school can handle more growth in part by finding savings internally and relying on philanthropic and community donations. The school will not expand too much and find itself with empty classrooms if an economic turnaround slows future enrollment.

''We're cautious in making sure that we don't make expenditures on staffing, for example, or other critical areas that we can't sustain,'' Snyder says.

How Bad Can It Get For a Community College?

Scott Jaschik summarizes the choices campus leaders at Valencia Community College are having to make, with insights as to the varying constituencies and stakeholders:

How did it come to this? Last year, the college had to cut $8 million out of its $100 million budget due to state cuts, all while enrollment has been increasing steadily (total is now about 22,000). Those cuts were across the board, but Rodriguez said the new approach will be used for another $3.6 million that must be cut in the next few months. Rumors from Sacramento suggest that additional cuts are in the offing, and Rodriguez said he sees no sign of the kinds of political or economic changes in the state that might encourage him to wait for a recovery.

"I think it's going to get worse," he said.

Community Colleges and the Economic Downturn

This looks like a must-read. Brief info page here and complete PDF of results here:

The current economic downturn has consequences for both college students and for colleges and universities. For students of all ages, the loss of a job or the fear of losing a current job - their own employment or that of a parent or spouse – clearly affects enrollment decisions: should I go or return to college, and if so, where, and at what cost. For institutions, the budget problems affecting the states have a clear and direct impact on the resources allocated to public colleges and universities.

Community colleges are the largest segment of American higher education: as of fall 2007, the nation’s public two-year institutions enrolled more than a third (34.6 percent or 6.3 million) of the 18.2 million students enrolled in public, private, and for-profit degree-granting colleges and universities (NCES, 2009, Table 9). It is with good reason that community college leaders proclaim that their institutions are always on the front line of the economy, during good times and bad.

To assess the impact of the current economic downturn on community colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College and The Campus Computing Project, in partnership with the education business of Pearson, surveyed community college presidents during late February and early March 2009, just after Congress passed the economic stimulus package. The survey, completed by 120 community college presidents and district chancellors, focused on changes in enrollments, campus employment, and budgets between winter 2008 and winter 2009. The survey provides new and timely data about the ways that the economic downturn affects community colleges and community college students, and how the nation’s community colleges are coping with the downturn.

Research Abstracts From the California Community College System

The California Community Colleges System has, in our opinion, really got its act together. We've been following and reading, via email from Willard Hom, a number of the "abstracts" that this system shares within itself. We have long wanted to share them here, but only just now realized that they are available to all on this website. Within the category "Strategic Planning" there are sub-categories for Accountability, Planning and Management, and Social Trends. The abstracts resource is explained by the system in these words:

In order to help researchers and staff in the community colleges, we (the Research & Planning Unit in the Technology, Research, & Information Services Division of the System Office) produce abstracts from a periodic review of publications (both electronic and paper media). These abstracts try to distill essential information from these publications that tend to be lengthy and esoteric in nature. To create broad and unfettered access to these abstracts, we have "deposited" them in the BiblioTrek information bank so that field staff and the public may "withdraw" them at no cost.