An entourage of students greeted professors at the doorways of classrooms during the first week of classes. Lines poured out into the hallways as desperate students waited to see if there were openings in the class. Hopes were quickly dashed when professors turned away students not enrolled, explaining that the class was already at enrollment capacity with a two-page waitlist of names. A crowd of disappointed students herded out of the room. When the din settled, twenty seats were empty.
The start of this spring semester at California State University, Sacramento was a feral scavenger hunt for open classes and willing professors as students crashed class after class in order to obtain the twelve units required to be considered a fulltime student. The reason had little to do with eagerness to take classes, but everything to do with getting financial aid. Students must be enrolled as a fulltime student in order to receive most financial aid loans or grants. Therefore, most students discarded the hope of getting a General Education class or a class the pertained to their major. Any class was fair game.
Professors were instructed the week before the start of the semester that they could only add students to their classes to fill enrollment capacity, as opposed to classroom capacity. Some classrooms had no empty desks, others had several. With so many empty seats, students were still denied enrollment in the class, beginning the slippery slope towards the Super Senior status most college students end up having.
When students cannot get the classes they need, in addition to not getting financial aid to pay for the classes they do have, it is no wonder why so many take more than four years, and sometimes more than five years, to graduate. This problem is even more impacted as schools’ budgets are cut by the state. Students received an email the first weed from Vice President of Academic Affairs explaining that “the scheduling difficulties you are seeing are a direct result of deep cuts in state support to our campus,” which tightens the enrollment limits on state universities. “This has forced us to offer fewer classes, which reduces the flexibility we previously could build into the class schedule.”
This is the reality of the deep recession the state faces, and education is taking the hit. The Sacramento Bee states that California ranks one of the worst in students per teacher ratio and “spent twelve percent below the national average per pupil even before the recession.” Ironically, when most so-called developing countries use education to combat poverty, the United States disregards the link education has to issues such as unemployment, homelessness, poverty and violence. In this case, the trade-off for higher salaries and more public works is a cut in education spending.
The revolving door continues when community colleges have to increase their tuition, an act contradictory to the purpose behind community college in the first place. Community colleges, for many, are an affordable way out of poverty, homelessness and the infamous college debt. Community colleges are seeing a similar scenario as state universities in terms of classes being so impacted that students are not able to get the classes they need. The Bee also reports that “in the Sacramento region, the Los Rios Community College District has reduced its course offerings by 8.5 percent over the last three years,” with a tuition increase last year, as well.
While the politics of budgeting and government spending are complex, with multiple reasons for allocating funds to particular causes, the United States has been privileged with public education which has been taken for granted by legislatures, most of whom are of the educated elite. The fact that California’s school system was being thrown under the bus even before the full impact of the recession emphasizes this point. Simply put, the budget balancing act should not be a struggle when it comes to education.
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