This winter, California voters have a big decision to make. To help climb out of a nearly $9 billion shortfall, California passed a budget last week dependent largely on tax increases. This November, a tax initiative will be on the ballot that would temporarily increase taxes for high earners and raise the sales tax in order to funnel money into education and other areas that have been suffering from cuts during recent years.
For community colleges, which have had to cut back at a time when demand is increasing, the voters’ decision represents a $500 million dollar swing.
The Hechinger Report spoke with Jonathan Lightman, executive director of the Faculty Association of California’s Community Colleges (FACCC), an organization of 10,000 community college faculty, about what the decision would mean for the future of higher education in the state.
Q: What does it mean for California’s community colleges if the tax initiative isn’t passed in November?
A: It’s highly demoralizing to folks who work in the public system. But more concretely it is that to run systems of higher education where you’re not only attending to the present but you’re attending to the future, to get legislators to make spending commitments from money that they don’t have or have little political will to collect, what it does is puts these institutions on a downward spiral, and that’s what we’ve been seeing.
There is just simply a crush of pressure on the community colleges. And our one opportunity is the tax initiative in November and it’s very, very critical that this pass because what it represents is the opportunity to come out of a multi-year downward spiral. It’s not a cure-all. And I think we have to recognize that. Because the need is as ridiculously great as it is, but it is still so fundamentally necessary because the swing just for community colleges alone is monumental if it passes or doesn’t pass. Essentially if the initiative is approved community colleges would receive $213 million in additional funds. Of that, $50 million would go to restoring course sections that have been cut.
If the initiative fails, then not only do the community colleges not get the $213 million, there would be an additional reduction of $338 million and this would translate into a 7.5 percent funding cut, which would be done through a workload reduction. So essentially colleges would be serving fewer students would have fewer course sections and would pare down their staff accordingly.
