I am still celebrating the passage of Proposition 30 by California voters last week. As the parent of a Kindergartner in a public school in Oakland, I am greatly relieved that my child’s school year will not be shortened, class sizes will not increase, and teachers won’t be laid off. But I’m also celebrating for another reason. California community colleges will be spared another round of devastating budget cuts.
The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, the program I lead at The San Francisco Foundation, focuses its grantmaking on community colleges. Many people do not know that the community colleges are the largest providers of workforce training in the State. They educate 70 percent of the state’s nurses and 80 percent of our firefighters, law enforcement personnel, and emergency medical technicians. For the low-income, disadvantaged populations that the 13 foundations involved in the Collaborative care most about, community colleges are an affordable way to gain the skills they need to move out of poverty and get a well-paying job that can support a family.
Community colleges are the portal to higher education and workforce training for 2.4 million Californians. In fact, the California Community Colleges System is the largest higher education system in the country (and maybe even the world!). Despite the tremendous opportunity they provide to Californians—and the benefit to California’s economy by producing an educated workforce—community colleges have been one of the biggest casualties of the state’s fiscal crisis. Since 2008, state funding for community colleges has been cut by a staggering $809 million. As a result, colleges have had to reduce enrollment by 485,000 students. That’s too many young people without access to higher education, especially at a time when there are few job prospects in our still struggling post-recession economy.
Prop 30 will immediately restore $210 million in funding to community colleges which will enable them to serve 20,000 additional students and reinstate thousands of classes that were cut over the past four years. It should also prevent further cuts over the next several years. Californians got it right in this election: it’s time to reinvest in public education to ensure that our young people have access to opportunity, our workers have access to good jobs, and our economy remains competitive.