Increasing student access to California Community Colleges and ensuring those students’ success are the community college systems two largest priorities, Brice Harris, California community college chancellor, said in a presentation at the EC Compton Center Oct. 2.
“When you look at the oldest part of our workforce, we are still third in the globe in terms of higher education attainment,” Harris said. “However, as our population gets younger and younger, our population gets much less competitive, and, in fact, we are now 14th in the globe in terms of higher education attainment.”
This loss of competitiveness has “terrified” federal legislators, and has been one of the most obvious signs of the CCC system’s need to refocus its efforts onto these twin priorities, Harris added.
At its height in 2008, the CCC had about one out of every 11 adults enrolled in a college, a number that’s fallen to about one out of every 14 today due to “education rationing,” Harris said.
“That’s a denial of access to the one thing people in a financial crisis need most, which is an education,” Harris said.
Fortunately, with funding from Proposition 30, the CCC system will have the money to rectify that problem for the next several years at least, Harris said.
The other problem, Harris said, was that three out of every four students enrolled in a CCC school required remedial learning in either English or math, and that those students only had a 42 percent chance of graduating with a degree.
Because of the efforts of the Student Success Initiative started in 2012, success rates in math, English, and English as a Second Language have shown tangible increases in the last year, Harris said.
However, whether the success of these programs, as well as of the system as a whole, would continue past the next few years would depend on continued funding from the state level, Harris said.
“If you don’t want more of our colleges to struggle, you have to fund us to help them before they begin to struggle,” Harris said he’d explained to Governor Jerry Brown.
