In California, Community College Graduation Rates Disappoint

Some believe the system's basic financial model of charging students as little as possible is actually part of the problem, and needs reform. The debate comes down to this: Do you help students more by charging them less, or by raising fees and using the money to give students more support, helping them move quickly and successfully through the system?

California has always been at the forefront of making college affordable.

In the 1920s, when it ranked 11th among the states in population, it had the most students in college, according to "The California Idea and American Higher Education," a history of higher education in the state by John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1907, California authorized the country's first state-sponsored junior college system as a network of feeders for the state's public universities.

Today, the state has three tiers of higher education: the University of California for the top students; the Cal State universities for the next level; and the open-access third tier that came to be called community colleges.

Community colleges students can work their way into the four-year schools, and it's a cheaper path to a bachelor's degree. Last year, more than half of CSU graduates -- and nearly one-third of UC grads -- started at a community college.

But community colleges now are asked to do much more than broaden the path to a bachelor's degree, from job retraining to remedial high school work. Systemwide, as many as 80 percent of incoming students aren't prepared for college-level courses.

"If we could control the input, the students who are coming to us, we could control their preparedness level and ability to succeed, we could easily increase our success rate," said Eloy Oakley, president of Long Beach City College. "We could do what universities do, which is cherry-pick the best students."

But Oakley -- whose student body is one-third Hispanic, one-quarter white, and about 12-percent each black and Asian -- says that would defeat the purpose of community colleges.

Lack of preparation isn't the only reason students come up short. They also have to work -- a lot -- outside out class.

"One semester, my mom helped me out and I took 23 units and got a 3.8," said Monica Robertson, speaking after a Spanish class one recent morning on San Diego City College's campus, a collection of buildings on the edge of downtown that resembles a 1960s-era high school. But every other term she has been working 40 hours a week in a car wash.

Between that and a change of majors, she's been taking classes for seven years. Though she has enough overall credits to transfer, she hasn't yet finished the specific ones she needs.