One of California's largest community colleges has a plan to deal with the age of austerity -- charging students more for the most in-demand courses







For a long time now, states have been telling their public colleges to do more with less. Legislators have slashed higher education budgets with abandon as enrollment has grown.

If you want to see what this will mean for students in the long run, check out Santa Monica College, a 34,000-student community college in California, where the most popular classes -- the ones students absolutely need to take before they graduate or transfer to a four-year school -- could soon be the most expensive. This is a future where the wealthiest students might just end up with a leg up on everyone else.



Since 2008, the Golden State has shrunk funding for its sprawling, 112-school community college system by 13 percent. Its cuts to higher-ed have not been the most severe in the nation, but they have been painful. Santa Monica alone has lost $9.9 million in support. And like its institutional peers, the school has been forced to cut classes in response. It now offers 15 percent fewer courses than four years ago -- not nearly enough to meet the demand from students, many of whom simply cannot get enough credits to finish their degrees on schedule, or transfer to a four-year school. A Santa Monica spokesman told me that some courses have waiting lists twice the size of the actual class. Out of frustration, students have started transferring to expensive, for-profit schools, taking out high-priced loans in order to get their degree in a reasonable amount of time.

Santa Monica has come up with a smart, yet frustrating, solution. This week, the school announced that it would begin offering more expensive versions of its most popular courses during the summer in order to accommodate students who can't take them during the school year. The classes will be offered at cost, since the college is providing them without any subsidy from the state. The price works out to $180 a credit -- not a huge sum, but still five-times what students pay now.