The $10,000 bachelor’s degree will be a reality starting next year at University of Texas of the Permian Basin. UTPB “science scholars” will be able to earn a degree in chemistry, computer science, geology, information systems or mathematics for $2,500 a year, compared to the regular cost of $6,452 a year.
“Science scholars” must be Texas residents enrolled full-time who do not need any remedial coursework.
UTPB already has a new science building that’s not fully used and enough faculty to serve additional students, so the marginal cost of adding the “scholars” will be low.
Gov. Rick Perry challenged state universities to offer a $10,000 bachelor’s degree in 2011. He hoped for “Web-based instruction, innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures” to drive down costs, notes Inside Higher Ed. “But so far the proposals simply tinker with the way universities price the degree, not the costs.
Most low-cost bachelor’s degrees rely on partnerships with community colleges — or even high schools.
Texas A&M University-San Antonio set up a degree program in cooperation with Alamo Colleges in which students can receive a bachelor of applied arts and science for $10,000. Through the program, qualified high school juniors can enroll in a dual credit program, through which they can receive up to 60 hours of college credit – half a bachelor’s degree – for free while still in high school. Those students can then enroll in Alamo College for 27 credit hours for $1,782 and finish their degree with 36 credit hours at Texas A&M-San Antonio for $7,722.
. . . Students must be ready for college-level work as juniors in high school and must be interested in pursuing a degree with a focus in information technology.
Texas A&M University-Commerce will offer a $10,000 bachelor’s degree — if students earn 60 credits at a community college before transferring.
All Californians will pay the same low tuition for classes at Santa Monica College—if they can get off the wait list. Student protests forced the school’s board of trustees to suspend its plan to charge a premium for access to new sections of high-demand classes. The state community college chancellor, Jack Scott, has said that he believes two-tier pricing is not permissible under state law.
But the problem—too many students and not enough seats—remains, both at Santa Monica College and at many community colleges across the country.
Making students wait to get into classes raises the odds they’ll give up before earning a degree — or pay much more at for-profit colleges that expand quickly to meet demand.
In Houston, the Lone Star College system will charge extra for classes that cost more to teach, reports Inside Higher Ed. For example, “standard tuition at the system is $200 for a three-credit course, but students pay $212 to study dental hygiene and $206 for computer science, according to a differential fee chart.”
“My own college behaves much more like a private college these days than a public,” said Stephen M. Curtis, president of the Community College of Philadelphia, reports Inside Higher Ed. By next year, nearly two-thirds of the college’s revenue will come from tuition.
His fellow panelist, Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa Community Colleges, said, ”We have no choice. The state funds are gone forever.”
Sources of Support for Community College of Philadelphia
Year
Operating Budget
% From State
% From City
% From Tuition
1977-78
$18,331,000
36.4%
34.7%
29.7%
1987-88
$39,163,000
31.3%
31.1%
30.4%
1997-98
$65,563,000
36.0%
25.0%
36.5%
2010-11
$120,085,000
26.1%
15.1%
57.6%
There are advantages to privatization, Curtis said.
. . . he does not need state approval for new degrees or curricular changes, that tuition increase are controlled by his board without state or local authorities having veto power, and that his board also has final say on use of budget funds. While tuition increases raise concerns about access, he said that the Community College of Philadelphia just finished its first fund-raising campaign, significantly exceeding a $10 million goal and raising $3 million for scholarships. And he read a long list of operations at his college and elsewhere that he said should be outsourced and could be in a private model: cleaning services, child care, snow removal and more.
Glasper doesn’t foresee more state funding for 7 to 10 years. He hopes to raise revenue by providing specialized training to businesses. He also suggested it’s time to look for ways to bring down costs of expensive responsibilities, such as remedial math instruction, by replacing teachers with computers.
Frankly, if you’re the head of a community college, one of your primary responsibilities is to keep your college really, really cheap for students. Don’t call it accepting reality if you’re just giving up on doing your job. Yea, it’s harder to security funding in this economy. So work harder.
State funding doesn’t recover naturally. Funding “rebounds” when citizens and community leaders demand it. Community colleges are public institutions. Go ahead and demand adequate funding.
In California, where I live, community colleges can demand all they want. The money isn’t there. Students would have more access if tuition were raised — and retained at the college — to pay for more classes.
When community college students drop out, they lose future earnings and taxpayers lose their investment in the heavily subsidized system, write Mark Schneider and Lu Michelle Yin in a Los Angeles Times commentary. Raising graduation rates would raise graduates’ earnings and income tax revenues. But how?
One important step to reducing the number of dropouts would be to streamline remediation programs so that students can more quickly get to a level where the classes they take earn them college credits.
Expanding online courses would let instructors reach more students, allow courses to start “any day of any week and any week of the year” and lower costs, they add.
Another way to reduce the number of dropouts would be to replace a system that awards degrees based on “seat time” with a system that rewards subject mastery. This would allow students to move at their own pace through a course of study, progressing from one concept to the next after passing assessment tests. Competency-based models would allow for the certification of prior learning, speeding time to graduation.
Finally, community colleges should learn from for-profit institutions, which are “leading the way in developing innovative online learning platforms and redefining an approach to curriculum development and faculty training to encourage uniformity in instruction across multiple sites and instructors,” Schneider and Yin writes. Graduation rates at two-year for-profit institutions are almost three times higher than at community colleges.
For-profits aren’t a model, responds Daniel LaVista, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, who complains that for-profit colleges charge much more than community colleges, burdening students with debt. (Of course. For-profit colleges are funded entirely by tuition, while community colleges are funded primarily by taxpayers.)
But LaVista doesn’t offer an opinion on whether community colleges could learn anything useful from for-profit colleges’ approach to online learning, curriculum development or faculty training and compensation.
Career colleges place students in the courses needed to reach their goals with no waiting and no wandering through electives. Many, many more students earn a certificate or associate degree. Nothing to learn or even discuss?
Low tuition isn’t always a bargain for community college students, argues Nate Johnson in an Inside Higher Ed commentary that defends Santa Monica College‘s abandoned two-tier pricing plan. If low-cost community colleges don’t have the revenue to offer enough classes, students will turn to high-cost for-profit colleges, which expand quickly to meet demand.
From 2001-2 to 2009-10, the proportion of Pell grant recipients attending for-profit colleges rose from 15 to 25 percent, while declining from 35 percent to 32 percent at community colleges. Given the much higher prices at for profit institutions, this has meant a huge — but hidden — tuition increase for low-income students.
After earning a bachelor’s degree and working as a pilot, Joe was downsized. He considered nursing programs at Florida State, Florida A&M, and Tallahassee Community College (TCC), but all had long wait lists. Instead of waiting a year and a half to start at TCC, Joe turned to a private career college, Keiser University, which let him start in three months.
The shorter wait, he figured, would make up for the cost, which Joe pegged at about three times that of TCC.
Joe was not alone. Between 2005 and 2011, the number of registered nurses graduating from for-profit colleges in Florida rose from 114 to 1,034 — an increase of 800 percent. Average published tuition and fees at these institutions was over $15,000 a year in 2010-11.
Community college nursing programs, which charged about one-fifth of the for-profit tuition, graduated 36 percent more students.
Florida community colleges raised tuition by about $800 on average from 2005 to 2011, Johnson writes. But tuition and fees for all nursing students — public and private — ose by about $3,700 because so many students chose the high-cost private sector.
If community colleges had raised tuition by another $2,000 for nursing programs, paying for enough spots to meet demand, students could pay $5,000 a year without a long wait, he points out. Now, many pay $15,000 a year to skip the waist list.
Robin Hood was the model for Santa Monica College‘s plan to charge higher tuition for added classes, say members of the very liberal college board. Those who could afford it would pay more, opening up space in classes for low-income students. “It’s an opportunity to make a very progressive policy, an opportunity to be Robin Hood,” trustee Rob Rader told the Los Angeles Times.
For many on the eight-member panel, which includes a humanities professor, an ACLU board member and a college counselor, the plan was conceived as a progressive response to drastic state funding cuts and was intended to increase access and allow more students to graduate and transfer.
The plan, said one, was socialism in action. But just an hour before, angry demonstrators had nearly beaten down the door, hurling accusations that a two-tier pricing system would shut out low-income students and lead to privatizing public education. A campus police officer used pepper spray to stop the surging crowd.
The board planned to add sections of English, math and history at $180 per unit for students willing to pay more for immediate entry. Regular courses, which cost $46 per unit, often have wait lists. A scholarship fund was set up to help low-income students afford the higher-priced classes.
Trustees canceled the summer launch after California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott said this version of two-tier fees appears to be illegal.
The college already charges higher fees to foreign students. With an excellent record of transferring students to nearby UCLA, Santa Monica College enrolls more international students than any community college in the nation.
About 3,300 students from Korea, China, Sweden and other countries are enrolled in the college. They pay the nonresident rate of $275 per unit and generate annual revenues of $13 million, which had allowed the college to offer a higher level of services such as counseling and more classes until recent budget cuts forced severe reductions.The success of the international program provided an impetus to expand the scope of so-called contract education, and in fall 2010 the college offered 18 extra sections of courses such as English, economics and art history open only to international students.
College trustees still hope to work out legal issues with Scott’s office.
State funding cuts are driving community college students to much higher-priced for-profit colleges, which speed the path to graduation, Rader told the Times. “Private, for-profit universities are targeting many of our students, and they don’t do as good a job as we do…. We were going to take their business model and make it progressive. It’s progressive jujitsu.”
What happens if you don’t respond to excess demand by raising the price? . . . We can make people wait in line or we can develop a more systematic method of choosing among eager consumers. That might be through some evidence-based method for choosing those who either need the product most or have characteristics making them most likely to use it well. Or it might be through a lottery of some sort.
…We could fund the institutions better so they could offer enough sections of the necessary courses. We could raise the price for all courses for all students. Or we can ration. But just saying no to a price hike doesn’t settle the question: some process will determine who will get the sought after prize, and you need to figure out what that process will be.
Despite the sharp rise in tuition at California’s community colleges, students still pay less than community college students elsewhere. And they get less in terms of access to classes, paying in time instead of money.
Differential tuition isn’t new at community colleges, writes Paul Fain in Inside Higher Ed. However, colleges typically charge more only for special programs outside the core mission or for courses that cost more to teach, such as engineering or nursing courses that require specialized equipment and small class sizes.
Pima Community College, a large institution in Arizona, this spring introduced differential tuition for high-cost offerings like veterinary technology and dental hygiene. The college studied the cost of delivery for disciplines over four years, according to college officials. To be picked for differential rates, which are 30 or 40 percent higher than standard tuition, courses needed to exceed the median cost for at least two consecutive years.
Some colleges also charge more for online courses, hoping to create a cash cow.
State funding for Iowa’s community colleges dropped by 21 percent while enrollment increased by 60 percent, reports the Des Moines Register, citing a report by the Iowa Fiscal Partnership. From 2001 to 2012, colleges survived by raising tuition. Inflation-adjusted tuition has increased by more than half, according to the report. “In 2000, an Iowan earning the statewide weekly average wage could have paid for a year of community college tuition in about 3 1/2 weeks. But in 2011, an Iowan earning the statewide weekly average wage would have needed to work nearly 5 1/2 weeks to cover tuition.”
Community College Spotlight is written by Joanne Jacobs. It provides a forum for discussion and debate about America’s community colleges, which are home to nearly half of all college students in the U.S.
Views expressed on the blog are those of Joanne Jacobs and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The Hechinger Report or the Hechinger Institute.
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