O.C. PLATFORM : Students Are Victims

The 3,000 or so community college transfer students promised university admission but then left at the closed doors of UCI are victims of more than a short-term budgetary problem.

No one in the “post-secondary public education business” expects anything but increasing student demand for college classes and increasingly limited public resources to meet this demand. What is needed is a wholesale reformation in the way our public colleges and universities are defined, governed, and financed. Unfortunately, deep political entrenchments preclude genuine reform. What will probably happen is that the students will continue to bear the real costs.

These costs will come in the form of increased fees, more crowded classrooms, decreasing opportunity for disadvantaged students, eroding services and (longer) baccalaureate obligations. This is the real message of UCI’s “We’re-so-sorry-but” letters.