Pressures of New Students and Old Weigh on Community Colleges
By KATHARINE MIESZKOWSKI
Published: April 8, 2010
Monica McCarthy, an academic counselor at City College of San Francisco for eight years, has worked with thousands of community college students hoping to transfer to state universities.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Budget problems have caused cutbacks in academic counseling at City College of San Francisco. Monica McCarthy, a counselor, advised a freshman on Tuesday.
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Go to the Bay Area Blog »But lately she has encountered more and more state university students clamoring to enroll in community college classes.
“It’s been crazy,” Ms. McCarthy said. “I have a lot of students from San Francisco State saying, ‘I can’t get into my lower-division classes at State. I need to come in here.’ ”
Not that there are seats to spare at San Francisco’s community college. From last fall to this spring, City College cut 710 classes of the 8,800 it planned to offer. This summer’s session has been canceled, and with it about another 860 classes were lost. One thousand six hundred and fifty-five students who tried to register in fall 2009 did not get into any classes at all, up from 635 in fall 2005, evidence that the ideal of universal access to education is increasingly unattainable.
Some City College students are now turning to other Bay Area colleges, like Laney College in Oakland, to try to fit into summer classes.
In the Continuing Student Counseling Department, Ms. McCarthy, 44, works