Dan Walters: Community colleges face change in California

California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may change a lot if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.

Brown, who entered politics nearly a half-century ago as a Los Angeles community college trustee, and state community college Chancellor Jack Scott, a former college administrator and state senator, want the system to refocus on students with firm career or higher education goals.

If enacted, it would ration access to consciously discourage, or even ban, attendance by casual students who lack the requisite goals. It would be the biggest cultural change since 1907, when the system was born with authorization for local high schools to offer "postgraduate courses of study."

"This is a comprehensive plan that will result in more students completing certificates and degrees and transferring to four-year institutions," Scott told legislators last week. "Completion matters. It matters for students – whose earnings increase as they become more educated – and for our state as a whole."

It also matters to Brown's hopes of fixing the state's chronically imbalanced budget, which has borne the major cost of the 1.7-million-student system for the past 34 years, ever since voters passed the Proposition 13 property tax limit.

Simply put, if the system serves fewer students, it will cost less. And that makes it a significant component of Brown's ambitious plan to shrink state spending commitments even as he asks voters to raise taxes.

Brown's new budget ties community college financing to meeting performance goals, such as preparing students for transfer to four-year colleges.

The parameters of the change are found in draft legislation, dubbed "Student Success Act of 2012," from Scott's office to implement a task force's recommendations. Overall, it would shift the system from open access to goal-oriented education and targets some state financing to those goals.

One section of its synopsis says, "As a condition of receipt of (student success) funds, requires districts to implement common assessment and student success scorecard … ."

Another would waive community college fees, now done for all students below certain income levels, only for students who "identify a degree, certificate, transfer or career advancement goal (and) meet academic and progress standards, including a maximum unit cap … ."

The "maximum unit cap" would be aimed at weeding out perpetual students or those who take classes for personal enrichment, rather than careers or qualification for four-college transfer.

Will it happen?

There's much in the plan for particular interest groups to dislike. But it reflects the oft-ignored reality that state government can't provide everything to everyone and that we are in, as Brown was once fond of saying, "an era of limits."