Calif. pilots 2-tiered tuition law at community colleges
By Lydia O’Connor, Huffington Post
A controversial new law will allow some California community colleges to charge more for their most popular classes, outraging some students and public education advocates who fear this lays the foundation for a new standard of rewarding wealth over academic standing.
Signed into law on Thursday by California Governor Jerry Brown, the two-tiered tuition law allows for up to six of the state’s community colleges to participate in a pilot program wherein schools can charge a premium price for the most in-demand classes. The option will only apply to summer and winter term extension classes, and the experiment will expire in 2018.
The six eligible schools are College of the Canyons, Crafton Hills College, Long Beach City College, Oxnard College, Pasadena City College and Solano Community College.
A popular three-unit class would jump from $138 to roughly $600, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reports.
Too bad the full article didn’t give what the “most popular classes” are that will be charged extra. Is it math, English, physics or dance and sculpture? Very incomplete info.
Sounds like supply and demand economics and if presented that way it might educate some students as a free-bee.
I agree that this a teachable moment for those younger students not blessed with the luck-of-birth education funds provided to some of their contemporaries by wealthy parents. They might as well get used to having less opportunity to succeed because the ongoing privatization and defunding of our public school systems and elimination of pre-school programs will only further the gap between the haves and the have nots. Some people believe that this is the way things should be and equal opportunity for all is just too expensive and too much dang trouble for “those others”. I think the majority of Americans are better than that kind of thinking and that we should always strive for a level playing field when it comes to education to get optimum results. Not everything that benefits a society must be profit driven.