Published
3 years agoon
The Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises state lawmakers on budgetary matters, prides itself on taking an independent, nonpartisan and even nonpolitical approach to important policy issues.
That well-established tradition continues in a new LAO report on a pilot program that allows a few community college districts to offer four-year degrees in a few obscure subjects.
However, political reality has made that expansion difficult. The state university system guards its place in the academic pecking order jealously and as a result, the pilot program was very limited, allowing the community colleges to offer degrees just in a few relatively obscure subjects that the universities ignored.
Ironically, the state universities’ resistance to what it regarded as competition for money and students mirrors the resistance that the University of California displayed when the state universities wanted to begin offering some doctorate programs.
The LAO report ignored these three-way turf struggles, which have bubbled up for decades, in its lukewarm report on the community college pilot program.
“We found little evidence that graduates from these pilot programs were better prepared to fill these positions compared to those with other bachelor’s degrees or that pilot program graduates were helping employers fill hard-to-staff positions,” the LAO said. “The most common benefit of the pilot cited by students was the relatively low cost of attending the community college bachelor’s degree programs.”
Having four-year programs in the community colleges would be unnecessary, the report suggests, if the two- and four-year systems would simply cooperate more on developing targeted training programs and better aligning course offerings to make transfers from community colleges to four-year schools easier.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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