California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may shrink 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 and 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 a legislative committee 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 balancing the chronically imbalanced state budget, which has borne the major cost of the 1.7 million-student community college 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.
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."
E-mail: dwalters@sacbee.com
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