I thought a recent blog post from the New America Foundation (seems centre-left but open-minded to other ideas from a quick look) had some familiar points to our ACE discussions and, less directly, the focus of ITPs.

Current (community college) students are scrambling to get the classes they need, often winding up on discouragingly long waiting lists, and many new students are simply being turned away. First-time enrollments are down 12 percent statewide, according to the system’s chancellor’s office. The community college system is a bit like an overrun emergency room in a disaster area, with a fixed set of supplies and a never-ending stream of patients.

But open up a typical course catalog for fall semester 2010 and you might not know the system is in a crisis. Community colleges continue to offer a broad array of courses that are primarily for personal enrichment and recreation: ceramics, motorcycle maintenance, musical improvisation, table tennis, sculpture, Pilates, kayaking, rock-climbing, to name just a few. (Not to mention Korean, Portuguese, Punjabi, and Russian, among dozens of others.) It’s a fantastic set of offerings, but hard to justify when students are getting turned away from truly essential courses, for example in mathematics, nursing, or accounting. Many recreational and enrichment courses are offered for full credit, subsidized by the state at the same rate as any academic or vocational class, and take up precious classrooms and parking spots.

Making cuts is not simple though…

The idea of reining in the community college offerings is not new, but it’s certainly unpopular. Communities and students don’t want to give up inexpensive college courses for obvious reasons. And many community college presidents will argue that enrichment classes are essential for the fiscal health of the colleges because they give local residents a connection to the institutions and make them more likely to vote for school bonds.

….but it can be done, if you work hard at it.

The question of exactly how to shed low-priority students is complicated, though. It’s not easy forbidding colleges from offering “nonessential” classes. After all, what’s nonessential? Some enrichment-type classes do play an appreciable role in students’ upward mobility, like cooking classes for aspiring chefs, for example. The problem is more a matter of identifying nonessential students — those who don’t really need college classes for educational or economic reason — and making them pay their own freight.