Community College Funding
Ventura County’s community college trustees and faculty should stop their squabbling and start pulling together politically.
Right now, almost every California voter under the age of 50 has attended a community college or will attend one. Yet the needs of this sleeping-giant political constituency of almost 1.5 million students is routinely ignored by our legislators in Sacramento.
Five years ago, community colleges got $4,000 for each full-time freshman, as opposed to $8,000 for the California State University system and $16,000 for the University of California system.
Today, UC gets $17,000 for each freshman, the CSU system gets $9,000 and the community colleges get--you guessed it--the same old $4,000.
How about giving UC and CSU a lot less and give our open-access community colleges a lot more?
This is an issue worth raising the political roof about, as opposed to bickering over how to split up a pie that gets smaller and smaller each year.
ROBERT OLIPHANT
Thousand Oaks
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