www.nytimes.com/…arge-more-for-top-courses.html
NYT article on community colleges lacking funding to meet needs of students they are “supposed” to serve. Needed classes are not offered with sufficient space for the number of students who want to take them. Reduced public expenditure on education being sited as the cause.
Actually know about this because my niece has run into this problem at the CC in this story in Santa Monica. It’s acute. If you can’t take needed courses, how can you become educated for the workforce?
I’m sure it happens also at 4 year colleges, and we know it happens in SNM where there just aren’t enough “classroom seats” to accommodate those who would wish to enter a particular program. Especially acute here in health care, afaik, which is also one area of greatest need for new trained employees.
Perhaps this lack of course availability is an opportunity for alternative educational opportunities to meet the need students have. Hopefully this need will be met by quality providers, and not so called Diploma Mills ripoffs.
It also seems likely that programs such as the Online Learning Initiative that Carnegie Melon and a coalition of universities including NMSU is working on will at some point offer alternatives online. Whether they will in fact be more affordable, and/or be supported by enough public funding to be effective remains to be seen. There’s a lot of pressure to cut public funding in the political world today.
What is clear is that students need affordable opportunities to learn, and they must be effective enough to create workers who can compete globally in the knowledge economy.