From the Texas Community College Teachers Association blog:
State and local governments are in serious financial trouble, and not just in California. The current recession is also having a disastrous effect upon the nation’s community colleges, according to a recent article in the Washington Post (registration).
It is axiomatic that, if unemployment rises, so does enrollment in two-year colleges, as workers retrain and people opt for schools closer to home in order to save money. Apparently, this is still the case, but with one important twist: Funding is declining for community colleges nationwide. In fact some schools are capping enrollments, cutting programs, and laying off personnel.
Hundreds of thousands of students are likely to be turned away from low-cost community colleges across the country over the next year because of funding cuts at the very time that record numbers of students are flocking to the open-admission schools, according to education officials.
The Obama administration is promising to help the country’s almost 1,200 community colleges, which educate about 12 million students, or 44 percent of all undergraduates, including the majority of blacks and Hispanics.
But it is not clear whether the infusion of resources will be sufficient or swift enough to stop the plans of schools across the country to trim programs and staff as a result of severe budget cuts from state and local governments, school officials say.
“For us to turn away students is anathema,” said Norma Kent, vice president of communications for the nonprofit American Association of Community Colleges, based in the District. “We are open-enrollment institutions. It’s in our DNA.”
I live in California, one of the states hardest hit by the recession and certainly one of the states with the greatest difficulty in passing a budget because of the nature of our state constitution. Our community colleges have already been hit hard and may be in for even worse punishment.
How have budget and funding problems affected your local community college?
