Students at Cerritos College have been receiving education on the cheap for years, but that’s all about to change.
An increase in fees by $10 per unit this July will result in just $120 more for the average community college student, but that small increase may help alleviate the huge deficit that California community colleges are facing.
This is the perfect opportunity for the student body, on each community college campus from the College of the Siskiyous in Siskiyous County to Southwestern College in San Diego to here at Cerritos, to show what they’re made of and what they’re prepared to sacrifice.
This economic climate is a battlefield, and the only way that to save education is by picking and choosing battles.
If students don’t take the heat for this one, and if, hypothetically, we were still working with $26 per unit in fall 2011, then those same students may no longer have the opportunity to study when they find hundreds of course sections lost due to underfunding.
Cerritos College will already likely cut more than 500 course sections in the falls, which will result in the loss of more than 3,000 students.
According to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, the community college system stands to lose more than 400,000 students.
California legislators failed to provide residents with the chance to vote on a tax proposal that would have been scheduled for June.
The only solution at this moment is to raise fees on students, unfortunate as that may be, but it isn’t out of the question when the financial burden of other students is taken into consideration.
International students at Cerritos College currently pay $210 per unit, and will be paying $220 per unit starting in July.
That means that an international student taking a full load of 12 units in the fall will be paying $2,640 for their classes, and that doesn’t include miscellaneous fees.
California residential students must toughen up and use the system to their advantage; young people are willing to come from other countries and pay more than $2,000 more for the same education.
Students, both local and foreign, are the beginning and end in the discussion about state-wide cuts that will adversely affect affordable education.
This fee increase should serve as a wake-up call to all students to try to work to find a solution.
The best that can be done at this point in time is to take the $10 increase as a compromise.
However, it is essential for community college students to represent themselves individually and collectively as a demographic not to be pushed around.
In the March 16 publication, Talon Marks reported on ASCC President Felipe Grimaldo, along with other representatives in student government, collecting signatures to petition against the penalization of Cerritos College for not meeting its Full-Time Faculty Obligation.
This is a demonstration of student action in response to California legislators who wouldn’t know how to run a budget if their paychecks depended on it.
It isn’t alright that California community colleges won’t be able to support as many course sections and, as a result, students.
But, as young people, it should be noted that we set an example for those that follow in our footsteps, which is an idea that is lost on the California legislature that landed us in this mess.
