Position on Community College System

State or National:

State

Position in Brief:

Support a statewide community college system with sufficient resources to fulfill its overall goal: to offer all Californians access to a quality higher education.

Resources should be stable, accommodate all enrolling students, be fairly distributed among the college districts, and provide opportunities for long-range planning.

Governance should allow greater authority within the system itself with local districts making key decisions about mission priorities to meet community needs.

Details:

Mission

  1. Support retention of all five missions of the Community Colleges: to prepare students to transfer to four-year colleges to provide workplace skills, career development and certification in a wide range of occupations to offer opportunities for life-long learning to engage in programs fostering community economic development to provide instruction in basic academic skills to those who lack them.

    Access

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  2. Support using the goal of providing access to higher education to all who may benefit as a prime criterion for evaluating the community college system.
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    Governance
  3. Support measures that:
    1. simplify the governance of the community colleges to provide greater authority for the internal decision-making structure of the system to manage its own affairs increase local decision making by local college communities while encouraging an effective and equitable balance of responsibility and authority, in areas such as funding, between local and state entities in responding to local needs promote the role of the state structure as one of support for the local colleges as they work to serve the needs of their students and their communities.

    Finance
  4. Support measures to finance the non-capital costs of the community college system that provide:
    1. stable funding
    2. opportunities for long-range planning
    3. funding sufficient to accommodate all students
    4. funding equity among the different districts within the community college system, with accommodations for different circumstances such as special expensive programs, cost of living, urban/rural differentials and community needs.

      Priority Setting

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  5. Support local determination of mission priorities for the district, within system-wide definitions of missions, guidelines and accountability standards. –End vertical–

Position History:

Adopted 2003. Readopted at last convention.