Two-Year Colleges Can’t Absorb Further Cuts Without Turning Students Away

By Amy Kinsel, Professor of History, Shoreline Community College

The cruel irony of last year’s legislative session is that Washington State deeply cut funding to higher education just as enrollment skyrocketed.  As unemployment grew last year, many Washingtonians decided to enter or return to college, only to find that they were being asked to pay more for less.

Nowhere were higher education cuts felt more deeply than at our state’s 34 community and technical colleges (CTCs). Enrollment in Washington’s two-year colleges increased by nearly 16 percent from fall 2008 to fall 2009, while funding was cut over 10 percent during fiscal year 2010.  CTCs have been strained to the limit under this burden.

This year, Governor Gregoire is calling for another round of budget cuts to the state’s CTCs. Her proposed supplemental 2010 budget calls for $43.5 million in cuts to the operating budgets CTCs in fiscal year 2011.  These cuts would be on top of the $82 million reduction taken in fiscal year 2010, for a total reduction in state support for two-year colleges of 15 percent over the biennium.

How will the state’s 34 community and technical colleges continue to educate more and more students with less and less state support?  The short answer is that they won’t be able to.

Statewide, 266,659 students enrolled in community and technical colleges in fall 2009.  What did they find when they arrived on campus?

First, fewer employees are working at the state’s community and technical colleges this year than last.  Staff cuts on my campus have affected everything from student testing to enrollment services, from computer labs to library staffing.  Students notice these cuts when they need to register, get help filing financial aid forms, use tutoring services, or submit graduation paperwork.  After an additional round of funding cuts, students who arrive on campuses for fall 2010 will wait longer for basic assistance for everything from admissions to transcript services.

Second, the enrollment surge coupled with budget cuts means average class size has gone up dramatically. For fall 2009, average class size statewide grew by nearly 7 percent. All three of my U.S. History courses were fully enrolled or overloaded this fall, with students on wait lists who did not get into my classes. Normally, colleges would open additional sections of popular courses like English 101 and Psychology 100. But this year, there is less money to hire adjunct instructors, even as tenure-track positions remain vacant and tenured professors face lay-offs.  Class sections ordinarily taught by adjunct professors have been cut from the course schedule and new sections have not been added.  Some students who enrolled on the first day of fall quarter found waiting lists for courses they needed, and some late arrivals had to register for whatever was open and hope they’d get into the courses they needed the following quarter.

While the state has not directly cut student enrollment slots at two-year colleges, neither have they increased the number of those slots to account for the increasing numbers of students who have actually registered.  Because of funding cuts and the colleges’ inability to hire additional faculty to teach additional sections, there simply are not enough course spots available for all CTC students to register for the courses they need. With further budget cuts next year this problem will get worse.

After a while, doing more with less is no longer possible.

Just as college employees have been asked to do more with less, students have been asked to pay more for less.  Tuition and fees at community colleges have gone up this year and will rise again next year.  During its regular session in 2009, the legislature authorized 7 percent tuition increases in each year of the biennium, for a total tuition increase of slightly more than 14 percent over two years at CTCs.

Increased tuition rates offset lost state funding, but only to a point.  State support has historically contributed three times as much to CTC revenue as tuition, which means that tuition must go up three dollars to cover every one dollar lost in state support.  Thus, a 45 percent tuition hike would be needed to offset a 15 percent cut in state support, an increase that if implemented would effectively deny access to the tens of thousands of Washington citizens who could not pay the higher tuition rates.

A 14 percent tuition hike over two years, while less than the 30 percent tuition increase at some state universities, is still a significant financial burden to many community college students.  A profile of the students enrolled in CTC’s in fall 2009 shows why:  31 percent are parents, most of them parents of young children; 47 percent work full or part-time (26 percent are unemployed, an increase of 6 percent over 2008); the median age of CTC students is 26, which means most of them do not get financial support from their parents; more than half of CTC students attend school part-time (53 percent); 57 percent are female; and 36 percent are students of color (compared with 24 percent of the state population overall).

UW President Emmert is currently touring the state touting a high-tuition/high-financial aid solution to state budget cuts to the university.  This supposed solution to the state withdrawing its historic financial support for higher education is not a model that CTCs can emulate.  Financial aid is designed to help traditional-aged, full-time college students pay for school.  Low-income, part-time community college students in their twenties do not fit this profile.  Indeed, the adoption of a high-tuition/high-financial aid model for the UW will likely make it more difficult for the most vulnerable CTC students to stay in school.

The most vulnerable CTC students, in my experience, are parents who struggle to stay in school while they work enough hours to support themselves and their children.  Some parents face even greater challenges.  One of my students this quarter is a single mother who lives in a homeless shelter with her school-aged daughter.  She tells me that the evening curfew and other rules at the shelter sometimes make it difficult for her to keep up with her studies, but that she will do her best.  Another student explained that he is living in his car this quarter and that he is so low on funds that even though the quarter is nearly a third over he hasn’t yet purchased most of his books.  Was there anything I could do to help him, he asked?

For these and other low-income CTC students, borrowing money to pay for college (as most financial aid awards require) seems too risky. Dropping out of school for a quarter or two until they scrape together enough money to pay tuition and buy books seems the better option.  I see students like these two leave school every quarter, and I wonder when and how they will be able to return.  Who knows how many CTC students will drop off in this way, even as our classes remain overenrolled?

These vulnerable students at the bottom will be pushed out of community colleges in other ways as well.  As tuition and admissions standards rise at the UW and other state universities, greater numbers of traditional-aged full-time students will look to community colleges to begin their baccalaureate degrees.  The requirement that tuition be paid five days after registering for a course, which is often a hardship to low-income students, may not be such a heavy burden to traditional college students who have parental and financial aid support.  By next fall, low-income part-time non-traditional students who register late rather than paying tuition weeks in advance may find few spaces open when they arrive on the first day of the quarter hoping to get into the classes they need.  Students at the bottom of the economic ladder, students who are attending college even while they are homeless, are the most likely to be shut out by rising CTC tuition costs and rising competition from students seeking to avoid paying even higher tuition at the UW.

Stories I hear from students who are struggling to stay in school convince me that further reductions in state support for CTC’s will erode access to higher education for all students. They will undermine the mission of the CTC system to provide education to everyone regardless of income. 

As a faculty member, every day I see administrators, faculty, and staff who are working harder than ever to educate more students than ever.  Every day I see students in my classes who are working more jobs and more hours to support themselves and their families, even though working more and studying less means they are less successful in their classes than they’d like to be.  Every day I wonder what has happened to the commitment Washington once made to provide access to higher education for all its citizens, especially low-income citizens like many of my students.  Is a downward path of less funding and less opportunity for college students really the direction we want for our state?

For me, a big part of the gratification of teaching at a community and technical college comes from the opportunity I have to work with diverse students and to know that I make a positive difference in their lives.  State budget cuts jeopardize my ability and the ability of my colleagues to continue to make that difference.

But my loss when students cannot stay in school is nothing compared with their loss.  It is heartbreaking to watch opportunities that for decades have been open to Washington’s CTC students disappear for new generations of students.  Community colleges were founded to provide access to higher education for all citizens.  When Washington politicians renege on the promise of open access for all, they diminish our commitment to ourselves, to our fellow citizens, and to the future of our state.  Our community colleges are engines for the future that the state legislature is in the process of turning off.

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