So why, with enrollment skyrocketing, are many community colleges hurting?
"I get that every place I go," said John Fitzsimmons, president of Maine's community college system. "People can't understand, with more customers, why that isn't good news."
Tuition covers just 25 percent of the cost of education in Maine's system. Other community colleges vary, but all depend on counties or states that in many cases are cutting their funding.
Maine reported spring enrollment increases of 20 percent, after laying off employees and leaving vacant positions open to cope with a $2.9 million state cut. At Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina, the president and two vice presidents are teaching classes because of a $2.3 million cut last fall.
Arizona community colleges have absorbed $19.3 million in cuts and may lose all remaining state aid, said Norma Kent, spokeswoman at the American Association of Community Colleges. Some systems have had to reject thousands of applicants, she said.
"Community colleges are built on access, so for us to turn someone away is like a surgeon saying 'I won't operate on someone who is having a heart attack,'" Kent said.
Community colleges hope the impending federal economic stimulus plan will help keep the doors open. Competing House and Senate versions include billions of dollars for Pell Grant financial aid, long-delayed facility improvements and expansions and job retraining programs.
Maine's Fitzsimmons is all for it, saying "intellectual infrastructure" deserves as much stimulus as roads and bridges.
"Taking people out of the unemployment lines and putting them in school is a great way to take pressure off the economy," he said, "and when we come out (of the recession) we will have people with higher skills and better opportunities waiting for them."© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
