NO on 92 to Stop Ballot Box Budgeting

Community colleges are terrific and vital parts of our education system. They provide a LOT of bang for the buck, and I'm sure they need better funding. They serve lots of students of all backgrounds, giving a chance to gain skills and education, sometimes as an inexpensive precursor to 4-year college. They're a big part of why California does have economic mobility.

But this is a bad law.

Most importantly, it is ballot box budgeting. This would write into the state constitution a very specific formula for how to distribute money. Formulas like this are bad for us. Collectively, they create the budget mess we get every year. The more formulas we get, the harder we all have to fight over the smaller and smaller discretionary part of the budget. And the less ability we have to respond to crises. If this passes, it will hurt health care, housing and other social services, and maybe also the CSU and UC systems (although I'm less worried about them).

There are also other things to dislike, if you need more reasons:

• Prop 92 could only be changed by a 4/5 vote (!) of the legislature. C'mon - that's a preposterous super-duper majority rule.
• The funding formula is wacky. It determines funding based on the number of young adults, not enrollment. But a CBP analysis found there's a big disconnect between those two variables [link - PDF]. The formula also requires spending to grow even when the number of young adults decreases, but it wouldn't keep pace when enrollment spikes.
• The fee reduction is not a good idea either. Okay, this seems crazy, but bear with me. It is true that many low-income students can't afford to go to school. But at community colleges, it isn't the fees that get them. It is the overall cost of living, most especially the cost of housing, which is often ten times higher than community college fees. Plus, half of full-time community college students already pay nothing, because they have low-income fee waivers. So lower fees only helps people for whom fees are a tiny drop in the bucket: 1% on average of total education and living expenses for a full-time student living on his/her own. [link-PDF]

I know, lots of other liberals support this. I'm sure I'll catch flak from friends who teach at or go to community colleges. But the law just doesn't make sense to me. I could forgive some of the latter features if this wasn't a constitutional amendment that will harm other services for the poor and make it even more impossible to settle our budget. If you're really interested, I really encourage you to read CBP's analysis, linked above in a couple spots. As usual, they don't take a position, just analyzes the impacts. And those impacts look bad to me.