Ventura County Star on Gov Brown's funding proposal

Should community colleges be paid only for students who complete courses?
Governor's proposal would change funding formula

By Timm Herdt
Sunday, February 10, 2013


SACRAMENTO — Having grown up in a working-class neighborhood in south Oxnard and been raised in a family from which no one before her had ever gone to college, Ventura College English instructor Amy Madsen got her start in higher education at a community college.

As a result, she has a special empathy for the travails of the students who have shown up in her classroom every semester for the past 23 years.

“These are not conventional college kids,” she says. “They’re unprepared in so many ways.”

Madsen has watched as some version of the same story has played out every semester. Her writing class begins with the maximum 27 students, often with a couple of extra ones squeezed in, sometimes with a waiting list. As the weeks progress, the class slowly thins out. By the end, Madsen estimates, an average of 17 to 20 students have stuck it out and completed the course.

“I’ve ended a semester with as few as 11 or 12,” she says. “It’s pretty dismal.”

Whether the students complete the course or not, however, Ventura College and the state’s other 111 community colleges get more than 90 percent of their state funding based on how many students were enrolled in courses about a month into each semester.

At a time when community college enrollment is being squeezed, classroom space is precious and state funding is tight, Gov. Jerry Brown has rekindled a long-running debate about whether the funding formula should be based instead on how many students actually complete their courses. In his budget plan for next year, Brown is proposing that such a shift be phased in over five years.

Continued here.