Fees may change in California Community Colleges

There may be some changes in regards to how fees are charged in the community college system.

San Jose Mercury News reports:

The 112-college system's governing board has begun a slow but steady process of restricting its popular fee waivers, which have been criticized for carrying few conditions and income cutoffs that could allow a family of four earning as much as $90,000 annually to qualify.
On Tuesday, the board will vote on a plan that would require students with fee waivers to maintain at least a C-average over two consecutive terms and to show adequate progress by taking at least half of their courses for credit.
Under the change, which exempts the disadvantaged and would take effect in Fall 2016, as many as 48,479 recipients could lose their fee waivers, said Linda Michalowski, vice chancellor for student services and special programs.
"For a student to enroll and do poorly academically, drop out, come back and do poorly, that does not correlate with student success, yet our policy on the fee waiver has said it doesn't matter; you can fail and fail and fail and come back and we will support you again," Michalowski said. "That doesn't benefit anybody."
LBCC's President was more blunt about seeking to raise fees.  He stated:
"There is a lot of room to raise more revenue and still be below the national average in terms of fees," Oakley said. If the fees were higher, students could still access federal aid and "would be paying nothing more, and then that money would be going back into the institutions, which is, frankly, what 49 other states in the nation do," he said.
Other people are blatantly trying to kill the California Education model.   The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education stated:

Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education President David Longanecker has been trying to convince California officials that the 1960 plan needs to be revamped or scrapped.
"In the 20th century, we were trying to encourage people to go to college and that made a heck of a lot of sense in the 1960s when California was a wealthy state," Longanecker said. "Today, California is no longer a wealthy state and we are turning people away from college who want to come. What we have now is a low-cost pricing scheme that is starving the system and doesn't make sense in the 21st Century."

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