In announcing his American Graduation Initiative last summer, President Obama said community colleges would be the key to increasing college graduation rates and training workers to boost the economic recovery. Now, a year later, expectations have been scaled back. "The graduation initiative fell out of a bill to remake the student loan industry," Ali Eaves of Stateline.org reports. "What ultimately passed for community colleges — $2 billion in federal funds to go out in the form of competitive grants between 2011 and 2014 — was seen by many as something of a consolation prize."
"The lousy economy has wedged community colleges between two sides of a vise: On one side, financial support from state and local governments is declining, and on the other side, enrollments are soaring as more middle-class families find they can't afford four-year tuition and laid-off workers go back to school to retrain," Eaves writes. Community colleges are generally funded from three different sources: tuition, property taxes and appropriations with tuition being the only source over which colleges can exercise much control.
Facing dwindling budgets, colleges are taking new steps to cut costs, including "reducing the number of courses they offer, cutting summer sessions, eliminating programs and capping enrollment," Eaves writes. "While these measures help balance budgets, they also make it harder for students to get into the classes they need and to graduate on time." Jim Jacobs, the president of Macomb Community College, which hosted Obama for his announcement last year, now thinks the funding system is broken."In terms of the percent of the revenues that support us, we’re down to 22 percent of our funding coming from the state," he told Eaves. "Ten years ago, it was near 35 percent. What’s mitigated that impact in the past is a reliance on increasing revenues through property taxes. But given the housing market, we’re in a freefall." (Read more)
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