California Community Colleges System - History

History

In 1907, the California Legislature, seeing a benefit to society in education beyond high school but realizing the load could not be carried by existing colleges, authorized the state's high schools to offer what were termed "postgraduate courses of study" similar to the courses offered in just the first two years of university studies. Thanks to the efforts of people such as Professor Alexis F. Lange, Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, the Junior College Act was passed in 1917, expanding the mission by adding trade studies such as mechanical and industrial arts, household economy, agriculture, and commerce. By 1932 there were 38 junior colleges in the state. The 1944 GI Bill dramatically increased college enrollments, and by 1950 there were 50 junior colleges. By 1960 there were 56 districts in California offering junior college courses, and 28 of those districts were not high school districts but were "junior college districts" formed expressly for the governance of those schools.

The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education and the resulting Donahoe Act was a turning point in higher education in California. The UC and CSU systems were to limit their enrollments, yet an overall goal was to "provide an appropriate place in California public higher education for every student who is willing and able to benefit from attendance", meaning the junior colleges were to fulfill this role. By 1967 studies were showing that the California Department of Education was not doing an adequate job of leading the junior colleges, and legislation passed control from the Board of Education to a new community college system with a Chancellor's Office and Board of Governors. The degree of local control in this system, a side effect of the origins of many colleges within high school districts, can be seen in that 52 of the 72 districts (72%) govern only a single college; only a few districts in major metropolitan areas control more than four colleges.

The Master Plan for Higher Education also banned tuition, as it was based on the ideal that public higher education should be free to students (just like K-12 primary and secondary education). As officially enacted, it states that public higher education "shall be tuition free to all residents." Thus, California residents legally do not pay tuition. However, the state has suffered severe budget deficits ever since the enacting of Proposition 13 in 1978, which led to the imposition of per-unit enrollment fees for California residents (equivalent in all but name to tuition) at all community colleges and all CSU and UC campuses to get around the legal ban on tuition. Non-resident and international students, however, do pay tuition, which at community colleges is usually an additional $100 per unit (or credit) on top of the standard enrollment fee. Since no other American state bans tuition in public higher education, this issue is unique to California. In summer 2010, the state's public higher education systems began investigating the possibility of dropping the semantic confusion and switching to the more accurate term, tuition.

Per Unit Fees
In the past decade, tuition and fees have fluctuated with the state's budget. For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, enrollment fees ranged between $11 and $13 per credit. However, with the state's budget deficits in the early-to-mid 2000s, fees rose to $18 per unit in 2003, and, by 2004, reached $26 per unit. Since then, fees dropped to $20 per unit, down $6 from January 2007. It was the lowest enrollment fee of any college or university in the United States. On July 28, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB2X (the education trailer bill to the 2009-10 state budget), setting the community college enrollment fee back at $26 per unit, effective for the Fall 2009 term. As of July, 2011, per-unit fees at California's community colleges stand at $36 per unit. Effective Summer 2012, tuition will be raised to $46 per unit.