Price Gouging a Public Good: Santa Monica College’s Two-Tier Scandal
Santa Monica College’s contentious plan to charge $200 per unit for in-demand courses this summer has been cancelled, according to spokesperson Bruce Smith after much controversy in the media and a public relations debacle in which protesting students were pepper sprayed.
All California community colleges are expected to raise fees this summer from $36 to $46 a unit. The Trustees of Santa Monica College voted to offer unsubsidized course offerings in which all fees would be paid out of the students’ pockets. These unsubsidized $200 a unit courses would be available for registration only after all the slots for $46 a unit courses have been filled to capacity.
Thanks to the budget crisis and an increase of students and a decrease of course offerings, LACC students have had to commute to other colleges such as SMC in order to get the courses they need.
Santa Monica College is known as a leader in preparing transfer-ready undergraduates to UCLA. You can bet that the trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District were watching SMC closely to see if a similar plan could be implemented at City.
The essential interaction of supply and demand would dominate if education were a commodity. More demand leads to higher prices.
Because of the high demand and lack of “supply,” there is some selective processing to select students deemed “fit” that will most likely stay and complete the finals with satisfactory grades.
Some might even believe that the raised fees at SMC are rather natural as laissez-faire.
The trustees at Santa Monica College who voted for the two-tier tuition plan were shocked—SHOCKED— at the national attention. SMC students like student government President Harrison Willis characterized it as an egregious exclusion of needy students.
After the SMC Trustees passed the two-tier plan, Jack Scott, Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, asked for Santa Monica College to wait until he received word from the state attorney general to advise on whether such a two-rate tuition would be legal. The attorney general informed Scott that the SMC plan to offer the same courses at different tuition rates appeared to violate the state education code.
The most interesting argument that the proponents bring up constantly is that a special scholarship $250,000 is to be established for the poor students who cannot afford those quadrupled inflated tuition rates.
Just as the price of gas goes up and up and up, education, when viewed as a high demand commodity, has a soaring price driven by high demand and strained supply.
“People know a good deal when they see it,” Santa Monica College faculty member Martin Goldstein wrote for the Los Angeles Times Blowback, which skillfully appropriated a modified “opportunity deferred, dream denied” argument.
Goldstein concluded that the option of offering “good public education” courses albeit at a higher unsubsidized rate is preferable to not offering the courses at all, which he called “lost opportunity costs.”
Is education, the essential catalyst to social mobility and the American Dream to get out of the nickel and dimed existence a public good or a high-priced commodity traded on Wall Street?
The two-tier plan was not new. A nearly identical proposal sponsored by Santa Monica College to offer transferable courses at unsubsidized rates had been introduced last year as Assembly Bill 515. It failed.
Unlike Universities of California or the California State Universities, California community colleges have held a tradition of open access. That idealism is about to be challenged in the current economic climate one college at a time.
4/16/12 – Los Angeles City Collegian – Issue 4
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