Re-posted from California Watch: Community Colleges Consider Limits on Retaking Classes by Erica Perez
As constrained budgets and course cuts have made it harder for many students to get the classes they need, the California Community Colleges are taking further steps toward rationing course offerings and focusing resources on students who are pursuing degrees, certificates, transfer or career goals.
Two proposed regulatory changes are headed to the Board of Governors in coming months. One [PDF] would bar students from repeating the same physical education or arts class more than once on the state’s dime.
Another proposal [PDF] would give enrollment priority system wide to students who are seeking degrees, transfer, certificates or career objectives and would bump others to the end of the line, including most students who have racked up more than 100 units, students who stay too long on academic probat
ion and those who veer off their academic plan.
The colleges already took one step toward limiting class repeats in July, when they cut off state funding for students to repeat most courses more than three times. That change didn’t affect arts or physical education courses, however.
It’s been a little more than a year since a 2011 Legislative Analyst’s Office report recommended that the colleges cap the number of taxpayer-subsidized units that students could take and limit the number of times students could repeat state-subsidized recreational classes.
The proposed changes don’t go as far as what the Legislative Analyst’s Office advocated. Rather than capping the state-subsidized units at 100 units the equivalent of more than three years of full-time college the community colleges would bar these lingering students from getting first dibs on classes.
The limits on repeat recreational classes should produce some cost savings, though it’s not clear how much, said Barry Russell, vice chancellor of academic affairs for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.
Under current rules, students can repeat gym and arts classes up to four times. In 2009-10, about 52,000 students repeated the same physical education course they already had completed in a prior term. For fine arts classes with an activity section, that figure was about 20,000 students. Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, for example, had 1,430 students who repeated a gym class and 927 students who repeated an arts class that year.
