As a staff member in Enrollment Services at College of the Canyons and the current Classified Senate president, I represent roughly 440 employees who are on the front lines in a wide range of operational and support positions. These employees are silently being burned out by a lack of funding to backfill vacancies and limited funds to support the programs and equipment we need to operate. The culprit? A broken state funding formula that allocates local tax dollars to other regions instead of staying in our community.
Community colleges in the state receive the majority of their funding through an allocation formula called the Student Centered Funding Formula. Rather than simply rewarding colleges for filling seats, it was designed to direct money toward institutions serving lower-income students and to reward real outcomes like degrees and transfers. Roughly 70% of what a college receives is still tied to the number of students, but an additional 20% is now based on how many students qualify for financial aid, and another 10% is based on specific student success outcomes (e.g., the proportion who earn degrees or reach certain benchmarks).
A key issue is the 20% allocation based on the financial “need” of students, which is calculated using the percentage of students who qualify for federal Pell Grants or state fee waivers. These use generic income cutoffs that are identical across all California regions, failing to adjust to the local cost of living in the Santa Clarita Valley. That is a very big issue for us, because a family here must earn significantly more than a family in Fresno, for example, just to cover basic expenses. To pay these expenses, they earn a “higher income,” which pushes them above the eligibility cutoff for student aid, even when their financial reality is just as strained by costs.
Only about 17% of COC students receive Pell Grants, compared to a national community college average of 38%. But that 17% statistic hides a far bigger story of students sleeping in their cars to take our classes, lines of students relying on day-old bread and hygiene products from our Basic Needs Center, and the number of students who skip graduation each year because they cannot afford the cap and gown.
SCV families earn more just to survive here, contribute more to the tax base, and receive fewer resources at their college. Unlike other institutions, we cannot raise tuition to compensate. Every California community college charges $46 per unit, set by state law, and that rate does not come close to covering what it costs to educate a student or operate a campus of our size.
COC is not waiting to be rescued. Our employees have been innovating daily. New programs are taking shape. The student experience is improving in a real, measurable way. But every time we build momentum, the state funding structure pulls against us. If this continues, the impact will fall hardest on the students with the fewest options and the workforce supporting them.
Here are three specific SCFF changes I support to improve the formula. To be clear, many of these concepts have been proposed by those with much more budget expertise.
First: Apply regional cost-of-living adjustments to the eligibility thresholds used in the 20% equity supplemental calculation. Index the student reporting pool used for the equity supplemental to local cost of living data, the same way housing and wage policy already does in other state programs. Colleges serving genuinely struggling students in more expensive communities shouldn’t be penalized simply because the state’s framework has not caught up to reality.
Second: Let districts choose whether base funding is calculated on the current three-year enrollment average or the most recent single year. Giving districts a choice would also allow them to revert to the average in weaker years, while rewarding improvement in the present – creating more balanced funding outcomes across the system as a whole.
Third: Fix the way we determine financial independence for students under age 24. The current system assumes parental support until proven otherwise. That assumption does not reflect reality for many students. The current solution, known as a dependency override, is a complicated process that requires awareness and time students simply do not have. We need a better approach that simplifies and proactively identifies student independence.
It’s time for a funding structure that reflects the realities of our community.
Michael Monsour
Chatsworth
