The California Community Colleges (CCC) is California's system of public community colleges.California Education Code Section 70900 (added to the Education Code by Chapter 973 of the California Statutes of 1988; Assembly Bill No. 1725 , section 8, page 17). Headquartered in Sacramento, the system includes 73 districts, which operate 116 colleges, and serves more than 1.8 million students. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the California Community Colleges is a part of the state's three-system public postsecondary education plan, which also includes the University of California and California State University systems.
The system is overseen by the 17-member Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, with its members appointed by the governor of California. The Board of Governors appoints the Chancellor, who serves as the system's chief executive officer. Locally elected Boards of Trustees govern the community college districts, while college presidents oversee individual campuses.Board of Governors Although the system's name is plural, California law refers to it as a singular entity.
History The junior college movement During the early 20th century, Alexis F. Lange, dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, led an effort to establish junior colleges in California. They hoped that junior colleges could eventually assume responsibility for lower-division college-level courses, allowing universities to focus on upper-division courses, graduate programs, and research. (At p. 2.) Under their influence, Berkeley and Stanford established separate upper- and lower-division structures within their undergraduate programs. (At p. 3.) While the push to establish junior colleges was fruitful, California universities continued to provide lower-division undergraduate education.
In 1907, Lange worked with state senator Anthony Caminetti to pass the Upward Extension Act, the first state law in the United States to formally authorize the creation of junior colleges. Caminetti represented rural Amador County. He cited financial, geographical, and practical reasons for establishing junior colleges. Rural counties were hundreds of miles from the state's universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California. The distance created financial and logistical difficulties for students who had to move away to attend college and for their parents. Allowing high schools, particularly in rural areas, to provide two years of lower-division college-level courses meant that "students could stay at home and save money, and parents could supervise their children until they were more mature". (At p. 4.)Under the leadership of Fresno school superintendent Charles McLane, Fresno High School became the first high school in the state to use the Upward Extension Act to establish a "Collegiate Department" in the fall of 1910. McLane told the Fresno County Board of Education that Fresno had no institution of higher education within and that moving away to attend college was difficult and expensive for local high school graduates and their parents. Berkeley and Stanford assisted with the selection of a principal and faculty, and 28 students enrolled in the department that fall. The Collegiate Department later developed into Fresno City College, making it the oldest community college in California and the second oldest in the United States. In 1911, the department's principal, A. C. Olney, transferred to Santa Barbara High School, where he established California's second junior college. (At p. 5.)
California soon became the leader of the American junior college movement: "In no other state was the vision of the junior college so vigorously pursued as in California." The United States went from zero junior colleges at the start of the 20th century to nineteen junior colleges by 1915, of which eight were based in California: Azusa, Bakersfield, Fresno, Fullerton, Rocklin, San Diego, Santa Ana, and Santa Barbara.
In 1917, the Upward Extension Act was superseded by the Junior College Act, popularly known as the Ballard Act. The law established state and county funding for junior colleges operated as part of local K–12 school districts. (At p. 6.) The Ballard Act replaced the term "junior college courses" for what had been previously referred to as "post-high school" or "postgraduate courses", and it authorized school districts to offer such courses in "mechanical and industrial arts, household economy, agriculture, civic education, and commerce". (At p. 18.)
Junior college districts
In 1921, the state legislature enacted the District Junior College Law, which created a junior college fund for California's share of revenue from the federal Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 and used the revenue to support the formation of junior college districts which would be entirely separate from school districts. The District Junior College Law originated with a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Elizabeth Hughes. (At p. 19.) The District Junior College Law was the first law in the United States to authorize the creation of junior college districts, and it was also the first law to pioneer the creation of "public institutions of higher education that were controlled by a local electorate rather than by an academic elite". The District Junior College Law became a national model for the creation of community college districts. (At p. 7.)
However, the District Junior College Law as enacted had two major flaws. First, it failed to supersede the Ballard Act. For the next forty years, California's junior colleges were operated by a confusing hodgepodge of school districts (under the Ballard Act) and junior college districts (under the District Junior College Law). Second, as structured, the new law was heavily inspired by a report of a special committee on education in the 1919 state legislature which had recommended that the state normal schools with their two-year teacher training programs should be reconstituted into four-year state teachers colleges, in which the first two years would be a "junior college program of a general nature open to all". By treating junior college as not much more than a general-purpose lower-division component of a state teachers college, the District Junior College Law tacitly encouraged the state teachers colleges to attempt to seize control of junior colleges in their immediate vicinity. This provision was abolished in 1927 and the junior colleges were eventually separated from the state teachers colleges, but not before takeovers had already occurred at Chico, Fresno, Humboldt, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Jose.
In September 1921, Modesto Junior College (the 16th oldest community college in the United States) became the first junior college to be governed by a junior college district. Just eight days later, Riverside Junior College reorganized itself to be governed by a junior college district, and two months later, a junior college district was formed at Sacramento.
Growth and transformation
In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was asked by the state legislature and governor to perform a study of California higher education. (At p. 8.) The foundation's report found that junior colleges were wasting their resources on trying to prepare students for transfer to four-year universities, when only a small percentage actually transferred. Although 79% of junior college students at the time expressed interest in such transfers, the report recommended that 85% of junior college students should be in terminal vocational programs. The report helped legitimize the growth of California junior colleges during the Great Depression in the United States—in that many followed its recommendation to focus on vocational education which immediately boosted graduates' short-term earnings rather than lower-division college courses of less certain long-term value—but, by nudging the junior colleges in that direction, also ended pressure to transform junior colleges into four-year institutions.
From 1933 to 1939, 65 public junior colleges were founded in the United States, of which five were founded in California, and the number of American higher education students attending junior colleges rose from 5% in 1930 to 10% in 1940. California again led the nation in developing career and vocational education programs in its junior colleges, using funding from the federal Smith–Hughes Act. (At p. 9.) Within California, Pasadena City College was the leader of this movement, with vocational enrollment growing from 4% in 1926 to 67% in 1938.
This shift in junior colleges' institutional focus from preparing students for transfer to universities to providing them with vocational education probably gave rise to the broader term "community college", though the source of the term is not clear. In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation report had referred to junior colleges as "community institutions". William T. Boyce, the acting dean (and eventually, president) of Fullerton Junior College, later claimed to have first suggested the term in 1935 at a meeting of a group of California junior college administrators. (At p. 10.) The first published mention of the term is thought to be a 1936 article by Byron S. Hollingshead, then the president of Scranton-Keystone Junior College in La Plume, Pennsylvania. A.J. Cloud, president of San Francisco Junior College, responded to a 1940 survey questionnaire by arguing that "the junior college is properly a community college".
The 1944 GI Bill dramatically increased college enrollments, and by 1950 there were 50 junior colleges in California. By 1960 there were 56 districts in California offering junior college courses, and 28 of those districts were not high school districts but were junior college districts formed expressly for the governance of those schools.
The Master Plan for Higher Education
The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education was a turning point in higher education in California. Under the Master Plan, as implemented through the Donahoe Higher Education Act, the UC and CSU systems were to limit their enrollments, yet an overall goal was to "provide an appropriate place in California public higher education for every student who is willing and able to benefit from attendance", meaning the junior colleges were to fulfill this role. The Master Plan provided that junior colleges would be established within commuting distance of nearly all California residents, which required the founding of twenty-two new colleges on top of the sixty-four colleges already operating as of 1960. The Master Plan also reaffirmed the principle that junior colleges were to be governed by local boards, under the general supervision of the California State Board of Education. (At p. 22.)
In 1961, the Legislature finally fixed the long-running confusion about whether junior colleges should be operated by K–12 school districts or junior college districts. (At p. 14.) Assembly Bill 2804 created a process by which all the junior colleges created by school districts under the Ballard Act of 1917 or the earlier Upward Extension Act of 1907 would form junior college districts under the District Junior College Law of 1921 (to become entirely independent of school districts).
Formation of a statewide system