Community Colleges in California Feel the Heat
Accreditors penalize cash-starved system
By PAUL BASKEN
More than two years after Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stood on a podium in Washington and announced the formation of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, some of its most powerful effects so far have been on a belt of community colleges nearly 3,000 miles away.
In the past year, at least 14 California community and junior colleges have been placed on a probationary or warning status by their accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. In many cases, the colleges are being cited for their failure to prove the quality of their performance.
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At the College of the Redwoods, in Eureka, for example, leaders acknowledge that, under budgetary pressure, they failed to complete the required self-assessment reports. The college was placed on probation last June by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.
“To be very candid, the commission was absolutely correct in placing us on probation,” said Tom K. Harris, interim president at the College of the Redwoods. “Because we just hadn’t completed the work in the satisfactory manner.”
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California may be just the start. The majority of community colleges across the country are expecting cutbacks from their states, according to survey results presented at last month’s annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges.
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In California, with tuition typically covering less than 5 percent of institutions’ costs, most of the state’s community-college system relies on state and local money.
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And conditions are expected to worsen. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeking to balance the state’s budget, has proposed a 10-percent, across-the-board reduction in all state spending, which would cut about $1-billion from higher-education budgets.
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The College of the Redwoods, with three campuses set amid forests in Northern California, is among California’s more-successful community colleges. It ranks at the top of its peers in both “student progress and achievement rate” and in the percentage of students earning at least 30 credits, according to a January report by the state’s community-colleges system.
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The college, under financial pressure, made some bad decisions over the past few years that may have worsened its situation, Mr. Harris said. They included creating strict policies that angered students, such as those that prohibited class changes after the first day and canceled students’ registrations if their fees were not paid 30 days before the start of each semester, he said.
“So people were just walking away and - I’ll be very crude - giving us the finger,” Mr. Harris said.
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But the newly reinforced demands from its accreditor showed that the college had made another error during its budget struggles, when it went 10 years without hiring the staff researcher necessary to produce its accreditation reports, he said.
The hiring decision was part of an overall “lack of administrative leadership in getting the accreditation report completed accurately,” said Mr. Harris, who received the accreditor’s probation notice on his first day on the job in July 2007.
The College of the Redwoods is not alone.
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http://chronicle.com
Section: Government & Politics
Volume 54, Issue 35, Page A1
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