California is outsourcing community college classes to the for-profit sector, writes Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. Students will pay more for less, he predicts.
Students who can’t get a course they need at their community college can take it at Kaplan University — for a lot more money. Even with a 42 percent discount, Kaplan charges $646 for a three-credit class; the community college, if it had space in the class, would charge $78.
Angered by the deal, community college officials have resisted talking with Kaplan to ensure credits will be good at students’ home colleges, Hiltzik reports.
If the student transfers to a four-year college or university, there’s no guarantee the Kaplan credits will be accepted.
Put simply, the Legislature has cheaped out on the community college system. The 112-college system, which serves nearly 3 million Californians, sustained a budget cut of $520 million, or 8% of its budget, in 2009-10. Course sections were reduced by 5% statewide, (Chancellor Jack) Scott’s office says, with as many as half of new students trying to enroll in a class being turned away at some campuses.
“The state put us in the position where we cannot serve our students,” Jane Patton, an instructor at Santa Clara’s Mission College who is head of the system’s academic senate, told me, “and it’s getting worse by the year.”
Kaplan has used the deal with the community college system as a seal of approval for its classes. But it’s not clear the for-profit offers a quality education, Hiltzik writes.
Kaplan is accused by former faculty members in a federal lawsuit in Florida of recruiting possibly unqualified students, pumping up their grades to keep them enrolled, and giving its own employees “scholarships” to keep the school’s federal aid ratio below 90%. Kaplan calls the accusations “baseless” and “totally without merit.”
If community colleges were funded to meet student demand, there’d be no need to send students to “institutions that keep one eye on academics and the other on the main chance,” Hiltzik writes.
True enough. But it’s also true that community colleges enroll many unqualified students who never complete a degree or certificate. Transfer students often discover their credits aren’t good in the California State University and University of California system.
California is so broke that there’s no chance the state will come up with more higher education funding. The only way for community colleges to meet students’ needs is to raise tuition, which is still the lowest in the nation, to pay for more classes. If the colleges imitate the for-profits’ scheduling — designed for working adults – and add online coursework, they’ll be able to compete for students.
In another column, Hiltzik points out that University of California Regent Richard Blum, a billionaire investor, owns a firm holding $700 million in stock in two for-profit higher education companies, Career Education Corp. and ITT Educational Services Inc. Blum is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
