What with the California economy cranking along & all.......
Yeah, and did they do it by cutting some other program?? In other words, responsibly get the month from somewhere?
Screw the citizen students!
January 13, 2011
Facing New Cuts, California’s Colleges Are Shrinking Their Enrollments
By Josh Keller
San Francisco
The $1.4-billion in budget cuts proposed this week for California’s public colleges could prompt a new year of protests that decry higher tuition, stagnant employee salaries, and the growing inability of Californians to afford college.
But as a barrier to student access, rising tuition may ultimately pale in comparison with a more fundamental shift: The state’s colleges have started to shrink.
California’s public-college enrollment declined by 165,000 during the past academic year, even as the number of people trying to get into college grew. Community colleges accounted for most of the decline, the largest in a single year since 1993.
The combination of a growing college-age population and a reduced budget has turned what was once a model for college access into a much scarcer commodity. California State University at Long Beach, which has lost more students than most colleges, enrolled only 9 percent of applicants last fall, a lower rate than at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia, and only slightly higher than at Dartmouth College.
The cuts that Gov. Jerry Brown, a newly elected Democrat, has proposed would ensure that the nation’s largest set of public colleges—comprising three systems—would continue downsizing well into 2012.
The campuses in the Cal State system, which had planned to grow this fall, may reverse course and cut undergraduate enrollment for the second time in two years. The University of California, which has managed to hold its numbers fairly steady, will begin to consider major enrollment cuts for 2012 at a Board of Regents meeting this month.