Community Colleges in California Feel the Heat

Accreditors penalize cash-starved system

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By PAUL BASKEN

More than two years after Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stood on a podium in Washington and announced the formation of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, some of its most powerful effects so far have been on a belt of community colleges nearly 3,000 miles away.

In the past year, at least 14 California community and junior colleges have been placed on a probationary or warning status by their accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. In many cases, the colleges are being cited for their failure to prove the quality of their performance.

Ms. Spellings's panel issued an unambiguous call for such accountability, and her department has sought to enforce it by imposing more-rigorous reporting requirements on colleges as a condition for the accreditation that makes them eligible for federal student aid. The burden of that requirement has begun to show most prominently in California, where the cash-strapped system of community colleges is struggling to keep up.

At the College of the Redwoods, in Eureka, for example, leaders acknowledge that, under budgetary pressure, they failed to complete the required self-assessment reports. The college was placed on probation last June by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

"To be very candid, the commission was absolutely correct in placing us on probation," said Tom K. Harris, interim president at the College of the Redwoods. "Because we just hadn't completed the work in the satisfactory manner."

California's challenging budget climate — along with other factors that have strained its colleges' finances, such as historically low tuition and a promise of universal access — has been cited by college officials and policy makers as a reason why the state's institutions are the first to show strains from tougher accreditation standards.

California may be just the start. The majority of community colleges across the country are expecting cutbacks from their states, according to survey results presented at last month's annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges. That suggests the problems with maintaining accreditation could soon spread, as more colleges may find they can't afford the staff and attention necessary to produce mandatory self-assessment reports, said George R. Boggs, the association's president.

In California, with tuition typically covering less than 5 percent of institutions' costs, most of the state's community-college system relies on state and local money. Economic troubles forced California in 2002-3 to cut the state's share of community-college budgets for the first time in a decade, to $4,443 per student, according to a report by the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

And conditions are expected to worsen. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeking to balance the state's budget, has proposed a 10-percent, across-the-board reduction in all state spending, which would cut about $1-billion from higher-education budgets.

After being combined with increases in funds from other sources such as local property taxes, that scenario would leave community colleges with only a 1-percent increase at a time when the colleges, which the state requires to accept all applicants, expect 3-percent enrollment growth each year, according to a report last month by the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Such a budget, which is still being debated by the Legislature, would force California's community colleges to absorb a loss of state funds equal to about 50,000 full-time students, according to community-college officials.

Successful College Struggles

The College of the Redwoods, with three campuses set amid forests in Northern California, is among California's more-successful community colleges. It ranks at the top of its peers in both "student progress and achievement rate" and in the percentage of students earning at least 30 credits, according to a January report by the state's community-colleges system. It is also renowned for a woodworking program founded by James Krenov, the Swedish-trained craftsman whose cabinets are found in museums worldwide.

Yet the Western Association's accrediting commission placed the College of the Redwoods on warning status in January 2006 and put it on probation in June 2007, citing its failure to produce required self-assessment reports in areas such as long-term facility planning.

The college, under financial pressure, made some bad decisions over the past few years that may have worsened its situation, Mr. Harris said. They included creating strict policies that angered students, such as those that prohibited class changes after the first day and canceled students' registrations if their fees were not paid 30 days before the start of each semester, he said.

"So people were just walking away and — I'll be very crude — giving us the finger," Mr. Harris said.

The college realized those mistakes and corrected them, quickly gaining sharp increases in enrollment, which rose this year by about 7 percent, Mr. Harris said. That helped the college's cash reserves swell from 1.5 percent of the college's budget to 7 percent. But the newly reinforced demands from its accreditor showed that the college had made another error during its budget struggles, when it went 10 years without hiring the staff researcher necessary to produce its accreditation reports, he said.

The hiring decision was part of an overall "lack of administrative leadership in getting the accreditation report completed accurately," said Mr. Harris, who received the accreditor's probation notice on his first day on the job in July 2007.

The College of the Redwoods is not alone. Long before Ms. Spellings formed her panel and began pressing colleges to be more accountable, the Western Association's commission for community colleges began making similar demands on its members. The commission, whose parent association is one of the nation's six major regional accrediting agencies, introduced new standards in 2002 that set clearer expectations for colleges to define their own measures of success and learn from the process.

The practice of accreditation was begun by colleges a century ago as a voluntary system of self-improvement. The federal government became involved in the 1960s, requiring that colleges secure approval from a government-recognized accreditor before students could receive federally financed grants and loans.

After introducing its tougher standards in 2002, the Western Association's commission for community colleges began finding some of its members caught in a pattern of promising they would produce the more-extensive reviews of academic programs without actually following through.

"The commission believed their claims in the past that they were doing it, or they were going to do it, or they had started to do it and had done some programs and would do the rest," said Barbara A. Beno, president of the community-college commission. "And then the colleges really dropped the ball."

Federal Pressure Increases

The federal government soon noticed what was happening. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the federal panel that evaluates whether an accreditor deserves government recognition, last year began citing the Western Association's Commission for Community and Junior Colleges for failing to ensure that its member colleges produced their required reports within two years.

Faced with the prospect of losing its federal recognition, the commission responded. After placing 32 colleges on warning or probationary status during the previous three years, it added another 11 to the list this past January.

Those placed on a warning status include Cañada College, in Redwood City; College of San Mateo; Cuesta College, in San Luis Obispo; Imperial Valley College, in Imperial; Marymount College, in Rancho Palos Verdes; MiraCosta College, in Oceanside; San Joaquin Valley College, in Visalia; Shasta College, in Redding; Sierra College, in Rocklin; and Solano Community College, in Fairfield.

Others sanctioned included Modesto Junior College, which was placed on probation for its failure to develop comprehensive plans for staffing, services, and programs. The college, in a written statement to The Chronicle explaining its probationary status, cited the fact that the accrediting agency "started enforcing the two-year rule."

The accrediting commission did begin enforcing the rule in response to pressure from the Bush administration, Ms. Beno said, though the underlying requirements have been in place since 2002.

"The colleges often have a perception that when they don't meet the standards, that the commission has changed itself," she said. "It's a way of avoiding the idea that they're not meeting the standards."

As happened at the College of the Redwoods, institutions facing budgetary pressures sometimes divert attention from their accreditation duties, said Steven Bruckman, executive vice chancellor for California's community-colleges system.

But the increased attention to accreditation at the federal level isn't allowing the colleges to make that trade-off any longer, said Mr. Bruckman, who serves as his office's representative on the accrediting commission led by Ms. Beno. He said the agency was requiring colleges to be more introspective, to provide a greater research base for their conclusions, and to be more data-driven.

In the past, colleges pledged attention to self-improvement and accreditors accepted those promises "more at face value," Mr. Bruckman said. "And now we're requiring them to really prove what they're saying."