THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.  MAY 16, 2013.  College enrollment in the spring-2013 term dropped by 2.3 percent compared with the same term a year ago, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Four-year, for-profit institutions saw the sharpest enrollment decline among higher-education sectors tracked in the report, with a fall of 8.7 percent. The report describes declines in every sector but four-year, private nonprofit institutions, whose spring-2013 enrollment grew by half a percentage point compared with the previous year.

The center’s report is the second in its series of current-term enrollment estimates. Its previous report said that fall-2012 enrollments had dropped 1.8 percent from a year earlier. Though the report noted that spring enrollments are typically lower than fall enrollments, it said that the gap between the two has been widening, with spring-2013 enrollments lower than fall-2012 totals by 5.4 percent.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.  MAY 15, 2013.  American Career College’s Massage Therapy students put their skills to work during National Nurses Week by offering free 15-minute massages to nurses and other personnel at St. Vincent Medical Center. The event enabled ACC to strengthen its relationship with St. Vincent’s, and the massage therapy students gained much needed experience honing their technical, communication, assessment, and networking skills. Some MT students gained new clients; ACC’s Surgical Technology and Vocational Nursing programs assisted in the event.

“It was a privilege for our Massage Therapy students to be a part of National Nurses Week,” said Tom McNamara, President of American Career College. “These kinds of experiences help them to graduate with confidence as they prepare to enter a dynamic profession projected to grow rapidly over the next several years.”

“This was a win-win for all participants and a way for us to pay tribute to nurses in our own way during their week of national recognition,” said Charles Celeste, Director of ACC’s Massage Therapy program. “It was gratifying for our students to be able to give them a 10-15 minute escape from their busy, stressful work.”

Each year, National Nurses Week celebrates the profession and all the work nurses do. The week begins on May 6, National Nurses Day, and runs through May 12, the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.

ACC’s massage therapy students enroll in a 720-hour modular program that encompasses multiple facets of the massage industry to prepare than as entry-level therapists. Students learn Swedish, deep tissue, and Shiatsu methods; spa and sports treatments; non-traditional bodywork and treatments for special needs populations; and business, ethics and professional training. The program teaches anatomy, physiology, kinesiology and pathophysiology as they relate to massage, in order to provide students with a basic understanding of the body, how dysfunctions occur, and how these relate to each subject.

About American Career College

American Career College (ACC) is a health care educator with four campuses located in Southern California. Founded by David Pyle (www.davidapyle.com) over 35 years ago, ACC offers students a comprehensive array of high-quality educational programs which prepare graduates for a challenging and rewarding career in health care. For more information, visit www.americancareercollege.edu.

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  MAY 16, 2013.  Senate Democrats introduced a bill Wednesday that would keep the interest rate on subsidized student loans at 3.4 percent for another two years at a cost to the government of $8.6 billion — a measure that underscored the distance between Congressional Democrats and the White House on interest rates. The interest rate for subsidized Stafford loans, need-based loans that don’t accumulate interest while students are enrolled in college, will double to 6.8 percent on July 1 if Congress does not act.

The interest rate increase was long planned — it was written into a 2007 law that gradually lowered interest rates for four years before letting them rebound — and was supposed to occur last year, but Congress passed a one-year extension of the 3.4 percent rate. The White House and Congressional Republicans have both proposed plans to base the interest rate on the government’s cost to borrow, which would allow the rate to vary from year to year.

Congressional Democrats, though, want to keep the rate at 3.4 percent until the issue can be considered in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The legislation proposed Wednesday, sponsored by Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, among others, would pay for the extension through changes to tax law affecting retirement accounts, the oil industry and tax deductions for foreign companies. The House, meanwhile, will mark up its interest rate proposal at a hearing today.

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  MAY 16, 2013.  Seeking to “reset” a contentious debate about the role of technology in California public higher education, the authors of a new report argue that California policy makers need a statewide approach to end what they call years of isolated, segmented and ineffective online offerings.

The report, by the education consultants Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein, was commissioned by 20 Million Minds Foundation, a California-based nonprofit that argues that technology can allow more students to enroll in college and that a tech-driven shakeup is good for higher ed.

The authors’ goal, they say, is to end the so-called bottleneck of over-enrolled lower-level courses that prevents students from advancing, prompts some students to drop out, and consumes state resources.

The authors, however, do not believe a contentious California proposal that would force public colleges and universities to work with private unaccredited course providers should be anything more than a “safety valve.” That proposal, advanced by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (and backed by 20 Million Minds), is pending in the state Senate.

The report is timed to coincide with the release this week of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget proposal, which continues to include $37 million in new money for higher ed technology.

Dean Florez, a former California senator who leads the 20 Million Minds Foundation, said the governor has not laid out how the money will be spent, so the report should serve as “a wakeup call for Jerry Brown.”

Faculty representatives in California are concerned that the Steinberg bill would put unproven private sector companies in charge of students’ education. They argue that the solution to access problems in California is more funding for the public higher education systems, and that the public colleges and universities are already offering online courses.

The report challenges that last point by arguing that the current public offerings are not going far enough, though the report suggests the public colleges and universities themselves could solve this problem on their own and that policy makers should turn to outsourcing efforts only as a last resort.

The report concludes that California’s online efforts have so far failed to solve the bottleneck course problem in the state. In California, hundreds of thousands of residents, particularly at the community college level, have been turned away from courses.

Hill and Feldstein argue that the state’s three higher education segments – the community college system, the California State University System and the University of California system – have each, for reasons of their own, failed to use technology successfully to increase capacity.

They assert that the systems need to coordinate their efforts to expand enrollment opportunities in bottleneck courses by flipping classrooms, offering new online courses and, as a last resort, turning to third-party course providers. They also suggest that some skills testing for prior learning experiences can help alleviate enrollment pressures.

Feldstein said he also wants to help reframe the debate away from a tit-for-tat over Steinberg’s bill and prompt a broader discussion about “students’ rights to access.”

While California students do not have an existing legal right of that sort, Feldstein’s rhetorical point is that framing the issue as a “right” might create a moral imperative to make sure students can get all the classes they need.

“You don’t debate about how much effort you put into protecting a right,” he said.

The authors say community colleges, which are run partly by locally elected boards — a vestige of their history as part of the public school system – are extensively using online courses but often in isolation, so students from one of the more than 70 community college districts cannot easily benefit from offerings in another district.

Cal State, they argue, has also not done enough to address the bottleneck. And UC, they say, has done little to reach new students.

They propose a broader statewide thinking, pointing to examples in other states, including at the State University of New York.

What they don’t do is advocate strongly for the use of outside third-party providers, which is what the Steinberg bill is meant to encourage, though they argue that such courses should be a “safety valve.” (The co-founder of the MOOC provider Coursera, Daphne Koller, has used the same term to describe some of what her company is trying to do.)

“When all fails, make third-party provider courses available,” Feldstein said, referring to companies such as Coursera and Udacity. “We don’t believe that going to that third-party provider is going to be the best solution for students because it removes them from their support network from within the university, but if you’re talking about a fundamental right-to-access issue, then you have to have a method of last resort for those students to access that right.”

Florez hopes such elements of the report can help end what he called a “food fight” between supporters of the Steinberg bill and those that are opposed.

He called the report a “reaction to the reaction” to the bill, which was widespread opposition by faculty academic senates and unions. He said he hopes it will help frame this summer’s budget bill.

“I think the report kind of lays out some thought processes for policy makers,” Florez said. “It gives them some opportunity by June to make some hard decisions.”

INSIDE HIGHER ED.  MAY 16, 2013.  The GED no longer has a lock on the market for tests that serve as the equivalent of a high school degree. Three states have switched to new competitors from Educational Testing Service (ETS) and McGraw-Hill — and many more are mulling a change.

The brewing battle between testing firms has its roots in the 2011 creation of the GED Testing Service, a for-profit corporation that is jointly owned by Pearson and the American Council on Education (ACE), the umbrella group for higher education.

The council first began offering the five-subject examinations, originally dubbed the General Education Development tests, as a high-school equivalency in 1942. Since then more than 18 million people who lack a high school diploma have passed the GED. Many of them have used that credential to enroll in college.

However, two years ago ACE teamed up with Pearson VUE, the testing center subsidiary of Pearson, an education company, to create a new venture that plans to offer a bulked-up version of the GED.

The new test will be available next January. Testing service officials said it will for the first time assess college readiness and also be aligned with Common Core State Standards, an ongoing effort to create more rigorous statewide standards in mathematics and English language arts. So far 45 states have signed on to the Common Core.

Officials with the GED Testing Service said the test will be substantially improved. A computer-based test is appropriate given digital literacy demands in the work force, they said. And the testing service added college readiness as a key component because of an increasing belief among experts that a high school credential is often not enough to keep someone above the poverty line.

“In the past, the GED used to be a terminal degree,” said CT Turner, a spokesman for the service. “Those days are gone.”

However, the test includes also includes controversial changes.

The new test will be fully computer-based and eliminate the option of a paper-based method (with a limited number of exceptions). Higher education leaders and politicians in some states have worried that the dearth of paper options could discourage substantial numbers of adults from taking the exams.

Price is also a concern. Some states subsidize the test while others add small fees. But for most GED-takers, the new version will be $120, roughly double its current fee. That’s a lot of money for a test that serves some of the nation’s lowest-income groups, critics have said.

Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst with the New America Foundation, said the GED was no longer testing what many states expected from their high school graduates. “It made sense to update the test.”

But she said the cost and access worries have rippled around much of the country.

“It’s just giving states pause,” Hyslop said.

Two New Entrants

The backlash to the updated GED has contributed to the arrival of new entrants to a field so dominated by the GED that, like Kleenex, the brand’s name is synonymous with the product. After the GED changes were announced, adult education officials in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York got together to begin discussing other options.

Art Ellison, state director of adult education in New Hampshire, said the biggest concerns about the new test were cost and access. He and other critics said several groups of adult students, including migrant workers and prison inmates, often lack access to computers. Polling in New Hampshire of test-takers revealed that half prefer paper for a high-stakes test.

“We needed a paper-based option,” Ellison said.

The group of three states approached ETS and McGraw-Hill about creating new high-school equivalency tests they could consider as alternatives. Both ETS, a nonprofit testing group, and CTB/McGraw-Hill, which is a for-profit publisher and assessment company, decided to give it a whirl.

The two new tests have now officially entered the market. And they appear to be undercutting the GED on price, both with fees hovering at or just above $50.

The competition means states now have to conduct a Request-For-Proposal (RFP) or similar process to determine which test to use. Meanwhile, the group of three states looking for possible new options has grown to a 41-state working group administered by the National Council of State Directors of Adult Education.

New York was the first to drop the GED. In March state officials announced that they were working with CTB/McGraw-Hill to adopt its test, called the Test Assessing Secondary Completion (TASC).

New Hampshire, Montana and Tennessee subsequently went with HiSET, which is the new offering from ETS. Iowa, Florida and Missouri are expected to soon announce the results of their decision between the three options.

“Once New York went with McGraw-Hill, that sort of broke the logjam,” Ellison said.

From the GED’s point of view, the 41-state working group drifted from its stated purpose of exploring other options.

“It quickly devolved into any option besides the GED,” Turner said.

Making the Transition

The struggle among testing services is getting contentious. That’s understandable, given that the GED is taken 800,000 times each year.

The GED’s owners said the new entrants are cheap knockoffs of their current test. Not so, said officials from ETS and CTB/McGraw-Hill, who joined critics of the new GED in saying it is past time for healthy competition.

Amy Riker, director of the HiSET program for ETS, said the group of state education leaders originally approached ETS because of cost worries.

“They wanted to make sure that another nonprofit filled the gap,” she said. “They were going to get nickel-and-dimed to death.”

In New Hampshire, the new ETS equivalency test will run $50 for at least the first three years after it becomes available in 2014, Riker said. (ETS is hardly a small-fry nonprofit. Its annual revenue tops $1 billion.)

The GED Testing Service said it is the only option that adequately incorporates the Common Core. Both competitors dispute that claim. It’s no easy task to say who’s right, given that the tests are just becoming available and the Common Core itself is still being adopted. The Common Core’s science standards remain a work in progress, and social studies faces an even more uncertain future.

The high school equivalency tests are also complex – the new GED takes more than seven hours to take. So weighing comparative quality with any confidence probably requires academic research.

Both the ETS and CTB/McGraw-Hill tests will retain paper-based options. That’s a selling point for some states, said advocates of those tests.

However, Turner said the GED would still be available in paper form in some cases, such as in the corrections systems in certain states. And he defended the move to a computer-based option, arguing that digital literacy is important for career and college preparation. The testing service also recently released a study showing that students in a pilot group had a higher passage rate on the new, computer-based GED.

“We will work with states. We want to make sure people have access,” said Turner. But he added that “access does not equal efficiency.”

Dropping the GED could lead to administrative burdens for colleges, Turner said. And some states could further complicate matters by endorsing multiple tests. One issue could be admissions requirements for colleges with open-door policies, where the GED is often a minimal requirement. Another is the “portability” of new high-school equivalency certificates when students transfer between colleges in different states.

But officials in New Hampshire said they were confident those potential hurdles will be overcome.

“We’ll make the adjustments fairly seamlessly,” said Shannon Reid, a spokeswoman for the Community College System of New Hampshire. “We’re having the conversations we need to have to prepare for it.”

Some states appear likely to stick with the GED, including Texas and Virginia. What other states do is anybody’s guess, but ETS and McGraw-Hill appear to have firm toeholds in the market.

“I’m really shocked that it took this long to have competitors,” said Hyslop.

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS.  MAY 14, 2013. The embattled Los Angeles Unified aviation school at Van Nuys Airport will continue operating next year, thanks to a $1-a-year lease negotiated between the school district and the city.

The district had threatened to shut down the popular program in July, when its monthly rent was set to double to $12,000.

In a deal negotiated by outgoing board member Nury Martinez, Los Angeles World Airports, which operates Van Nuys, agreed to a reduced rent for the site, on a month-to-month lease.

“This is a victory — not just for our students, teacher and faculty, not just for the aviation community, but for the San Fernando Valley and the city of Los Angeles,” Martinez said. “The students we educate here are going on to good-paying, middle-class jobs.”

Other advocates for the school included Si and Betty Robin, the owners of Sensor Systems Inc., a Chatsworth company that supplies aircraft antennaes.

Located on three acres just west of the main runway, the school operates as a two-year program that teaches airframe and powerplant operation. It’s open to about 100 adult and high school students, and has a 92 percent graduation rate.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE.  MAY 14, 2013.  Six current and former San Francisco Unified School District employees, including an ex-associate superintendent, are facing a total of 205 felony charges for allegedly misappropriating $15 million in public funds, prosecutors said Tuesday.

A three-year investigation found the defendants illegally redirected government grants that were supposed to be used for after-school and health programs for a variety of purposes, including lining their own pockets, prosecutors said. The six allegedly diverted a total of $250,000 over 10 years for their personal use.

“All of this money was inappropriately used,” said District Attorney George Gascón. “We had people in positions of trust diverting money frequently for personal use. This is one of the worst kinds of corruption.”

The defendants include Trish Bascom, 66, who was associate superintendent of student support services, and former members of her management team. Bascom retired in June 2010, a few months before district officials publicly disclosed the “irregularities in accounting practices.”

Bascom faces 94 felony charges, Gascón said.

The other defendants include Linda Sue Lovelace, 62, a former senior executive director in the student support services division; Meyla Ruwin, 51, a senior executive director who is on long-term leave; Lilian Capuli, 51, a former principal administrative analyst; and Betty Chuey Wong, 57, a senior clerk who is on leave, Gascón said.

Also facing charges is Mychel Navales, a former assistant principal at Marina Middle School who is Lovelace’s romantic partner. Prosecutors say Lovelace paid her $12,700 for work she never performed for the district, and that separately, Navales, 42, embezzled $5,800 from the middle school.

The women face charges including grand theft, embezzlement and misappropriation of public money, forgery and perjury, prosecutors said. They were expected to surrender voluntarily Wednesday.

Grant money diverted

Prosecutors said Bascom and her employees diverted federal and state grant money to accounts at three community organizations that hold contracts with the district – Edgewood Center for Children and Families, Bay Area Community Resources and the San Francisco School Alliance.

The district employees then directed the spending of the illegal funds.

Some staff got bonuses

According to prosecutors, the defendants took back some of the money for themselves, paid bonuses to other school district employees, paid $400,000 in salaries to “off-the-books” workers and spent $200,000 to establish and maintain computer and phone systems in Bascom’s student support services division. District officials said they used separate computer systems to “perpetuate the scheme.”

Bascom is also suspected of transferring $500,000 to an account held by a firm that was considering hiring her, ETR Associates, which provides health and education consulting, prosecutors said. The firm and its executives do not face charges.

The defendants wrongly reported to state and federal officials that the money was spent according to grant specifications, prosecutors said.

While $6.7 million of the total was ultimately spent on children’s programs, the expenditures did not comply with the terms of the grants, prosecutors said.

Leftover funds

Bascom’s attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said he hadn’t seen the list of charges against his client, but that it had been a long-standing practice in the district to transfer grant funds to community organizations to ensure leftover funds wouldn’t have to be returned.

She was following pre-existing protocol, he said.

So far, Edgewood and Bay Area Community Resources, which offer a range of youth services, have returned $4.7 million, said Gentle Blythe, school district spokeswoman.

No complicity

Officials from both nonprofits said they cooperated with the investigation and were not complicit in the acts of the district employees.

“In 2010, when our organization had concerns about directives given to us by various SFUSD school officials, we brought those concerns to the attention of senior district administrators, which triggered the current investigation,” said Martin Weinstein, Bay Area Community Resources CEO. His agency provides services that include after-school programs. “Since then, we have cooperated fully with the school district and law enforcement officials.”

The School Alliance, which helps create and support district reform efforts, hasn’t returned any funds to the district and invested $250,000 of the grant funds in the stock market and lost it, the district attorney said. Officials there did not return calls for comment.

Since the problems were discovered three years ago, the school district says it has created safeguards for tracking grant money.

Superintendent Richard Carranza said in a statement. “We conducted a top-to-bottom review of the department and its practices, and have put in place several measures to prevent any similar wrongdoing in the future.”

EDSOURCE.  MAY 14, 2013.  Backing away from his controversial plan to hand control of adult education over to community colleges, Gov. Jerry Brown is instead proposing that regional consortia, made up of community colleges and school districts, determine adult ed’s future. However, his new plan is also stirring controversy.

In his budget revision unveiled Tuesday, Brown provides substantially more dedicated funding for adult education beginning in 2015-16, raising the amount allocated to $500 million instead of the $300 million in his original budget proposal for 2013-14 released in January. Brown’s original budget would also have made community colleges the lead agency for running the programs, which traditionally have been run by K-12 districts.

However, Brown’s latest budget plan would retain the status quo for adult education, at least in the short term: For the next two years there will be no dedicated funding for adult ed programs.

This concerns Chris Nelson, president of the California Council for Adult Education and administrator for Oakland Unified’s adult education program, which the school board has voted to close at the end of the school year.

“It appears that the $300 million that the governor proposed for next year earmarked for adult education to go to the community college system is no longer in the budget,” he said.

Adult education has not had a dedicated funding stream since 2009, when the state allowed school districts to use adult ed funds for any purpose. That loosening of restrictions on the funds has led to the closing or erosion of adult ed programs throughout the state. To encourage school districts to not abandon their current adult schools and to join a regional consortium, the governor’s budget revision proposes that 75 percent of the $500 million – or $350 million – must go to existing programs. The remaining $150 million would presumably go to regions, particularly in rural counties, that do not currently have adult education programs. It will be up to the California Department of Education and the community colleges’ Chancellor’s Office to allocate the funds, but the funding would be part of the California Community Colleges’ budget.

During the past few months, more districts have given preliminary layoff notices to adult school staff based on the governor’s earlier proposal to shift responsibility to community colleges starting in 2013-14. The governor’s change of heart is due to these “unintended consequences,” according to Ana Matosantos, California’s director of finance.

Although adult education advocates “acknowledge and appreciate” the governor’s efforts to provide incentives for districts to keep adult ed programs, they do not think his proposal goes far enough to protect adult education, said Dawn Koepke, a lobbyist and spokesperson for the two statewide organizations supporting adult ed, the California Council for Adult Education (CCAE) and the California Adult Education Administrators Association (CAEAA).

Many school districts do not want to continue to fund adult ed unless they have funding specifically dedicated to adult programs, she said.

“School districts like Oakland are prepared to sweep the remaining adult education dollars in full to backfill their K-12 programs,” she said in an e-mail. “As such, this proposal does nothing to ensure that the once fifth largest adult education program in the state is maintained – particularly with the increasing need for English as a Second Language and citizenship programs under the proposed federal immigration reform plan.”

Koepke said advocates are also concerned about the funding being part of the community colleges’ budget. “This is incredibly problematic as it provides greater authority and decision making to the California Community Colleges despite suggesting that the California Department of Education would be a key participant in allocating the dollars,” she said. “If the California Department of Education has no formal budget authority over those dollars, there is no assurance that such fair, collaborative decision making will occur.”

Koepke says she plans to work with the Legislature to address the adult ed community’s concerns. Some legislators had openly disagreed with Brown’s initial proposal to shift all responsibility to community colleges.

Less controversial is the governor’s proposal to focus funds on areas he deems most important: English as a Second Language, high school diploma and GED preparation, citizenship and career-technical courses. Funds could not be used for parenting, home economics or older adult programs.

Before the recession, the state spent $634 million in dedicated funding for adult education. In 2009, when districts were allowed to use adult ed funds for any purpose, many chose to give that money to K-12 programs instead. The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that currently only about $300 million is spent on adult education.

The governor’s proposed consortia could also include other groups that provide adult education classes, such as California Workforce Investment boards, local correctional facilities and community-based organizations. The budget allocates $30 million in 2013-14 for two-year planning and implementation grants.

Both the California Department of Education and the Legislative Analyst’s Office have urged the governor to develop a more coordinated regional approach to organizing adult education programs to avoid duplicative efforts by K-12 adult schools and community colleges. Koepke said the organizations she represents also support such coordination.

EDSOURCE.  MAY 14, 2013. Community colleges will receive millions more to begin to restore cut classes, rebuild flagging enrollment and strengthen student support services under Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget released Tuesday.

Brown would add an additional $30 million to the system’s 2013-14 apportionment, raising it to $226.9 million from the Proposition 98 school funding guarantee. Unlike the January budget proposal, however, when Gov. Brown left it to the California Community Colleges Board of Governors to decide how to spend the money, the revise spells it out.

The budget calls for $89.4 million to go toward rebuilding enrollment, which fell by nearly half a million students in the past four years due to cutbacks in classes. The increase would provide enough money to pay for about 40,000 additional students.

Community colleges will receive another $87.5 million in cost-of-living increases, which would add less than 2 percent to the base funding amount, but will allow colleges to keep pace with rising costs of electricity and other services and supplies, said Paul Feist, the vice chancellor for communications with the community college chancellor’s office.

Brown also wants to take $50 million and add it to the matriculation budget to improve and expand programs to help students reach their goals, raising the total to $99 million. This will help fund the trifecta of support services in the Student Success Act of 2012: counseling and advising services, orientation for every student, and having each student design an education plan with a path to a degree, certificate or transfer to a four-year college.

The community college proposal was part of a budget generally seen as favorable for education. The proposal also calls for increases of up to 20 percent in the general fund apportionment to both the University of California and California State University systems, and calls for freezes on tuition increases in both those systems through 2016-17.

Jessie Ryan, associate director of the nonprofit Campaign for College Opportunity, which advocates for more college opportunities for youth, said her organization is very happy with Brown’s focus on access and student success.

“I think much of his proposal reflects his willingness to ask the system to be more accountable for improvements in graduation rates, in better transfer rates, in the number of low-income students who are successfully completing their degrees, and we think this is a critical direction, because we know we’re going to have this workforce shortage,” Ryan said.

Brown also withdrew several proposals that generated a backlash from his January budget for community colleges. The most strongly criticized was his plan to move adult education from K-12 school districts to community colleges.

He also withdrew an earlier recommendation to move what’s known as the census date, when schools take a count of their students for state funding, from the fall to the spring, which would essentially fund colleges based on student success rates rather than enrollment. And he backed away from his proposal to require students with more than 90 units to pay the full unsubsidized price of classes, which would cost between $127 and $190 per credit instead of $46 per credit.

Students lobbied against the unit cap, arguing that sometimes they’re forced to enroll in classes they don’t want or need because their required courses are full and they could lose their financial aid by dropping to part-time status. The chancellor’s office estimated that about 117,000 students could be affected.

“We saw this as an insidious proposal,” said Rich Copenhagen, president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges and a student in the Oakland-based Peralta Community College District. Student leaders are concerned that anytime there’s another requirement attached to financial aid it creates a two-tiered system of access, he said.

“So we’re always fighting against proposals that would create opportunities for those who are privileged with money and shutting out those that don’t have money,” Copenhagen said.

But students say the governor didn’t budge enough on his January proposal to require all community college students seeking fee waivers from the Board of Governors to first fill out theFree Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. They’re concerned that some parents won’t provide the financial information needed to apply on the federal form; the Board of Governors waiver does not require the information. Brown is now recommending that the federal application process be phased in over the next year to give the community college system time to figure out another way to help those students gather enough documents to meet federal requirements.

The Campaign for College Opportunity supports the plan, Ryan said, because FAFSA opens the door for low-income students to receive federal Pell Grants that cover more than just tuition, which is the only item now covered by the Board of Governors fee waiver.

“I think it’s also really important to recognize that right now community college students are leaving large amounts of federal aid on the table,” Ryan said. “I know it’s millions of dollars.” However, Copenhagen argues that Congress reduced lifetime Pell Grant awards and that could prevent community college students from being eligible once they’re enrolled in a four-year college.

The Legislature could make the final decision on the aid requirement when they finalize the state budget in coming months, but lawmakers aren’t yet in accord. In subcommittee hearings last month, the Assembly recommended against the proposal while the Senate has so far put off a vote.

SILICON VALLEY BUSINESS JOURNAL.  MAY 14, 2013.  Silicon Valley is being outpaced in new online technology jobs by both Southern California and the Central Valley, but a new report says the industry job gains could help the economy for the entire state.

Based on an analysis of job ads in different regions of the state, tech jobs in the Bay Area (including Silicon Valley) increased 2.9 percent during the last year. In California’s Central Valley, the increase was 11.8 percent, despite double-digit unemployment in several counties in the region.

The report was released Tuesday by the D.C.-based Progressive Policy Institute.

“The Central Valley is benefiting from a diverse mix of employers,” wrote study author Michael Mandel, chief economist for the think tank. He singled out nearby universities looking for tech talent, plus area companies like Smart Hospitality Corporation, which provides entertainment systems for hotels, and mobile app password maker Keeper Security.

Developers in particular have an opening in the Central Valley, where there was a 40 percent increase in job ads for professionals in the field in the last year. The Bay Area saw a 1.6 percent increase in developer job ads.

Mandel found a bigger increase for the Bay Area in demand for media and communications professionals stemming from new online technology, with a 13.7 percent year-over-year increase. That’s compared to 15.4 percent growth in the Central Valley and 34.2 percent in Southern California.

“We saw from the late 1990s that once the tech sector gets hot, it can exhaust the normal labor sources,” Mandel wrote, adding that excess regulation in growing industries can hurt potential job gains. “California’s Internet/tech growth can help the whole state.”