California's budget crisis underscores the unfairness of a funding formula that penalizes many of the state's 108 community colleges. The penalty is particularly severe for San Diego-area colleges.

The San Diego Community College District board of trustees recently approved a tentative budget that will pare about 450 classes, while reducing library, tutoring and counseling hours at its three campuses. Mesa College, one of the nation's largest two-year schools, will cut about 300 classes, denying access to some 3,000 students.

To understand the severity of these cutbacks, one should remember that the San Diego Community College District is well below the statewide funding average, while Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista and Grossmont-Cuyamaca College in East County rank near the bottom in state funding.

The flawed funding formula flows in part from the passage in 1988 of legislation that was supposed to stabilize the distribution of tax revenues to school districts. Meantime, the local colleges keep being shafted, while colleges in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area flourish because of their political clout. A community college in West Kern County receives $4,000-plus more per student than do San Diego's colleges.

The funding disparity for these cash-starved community colleges becomes even more pronounced in light of the Legislature's history of shortchanging two-year schools at budget time. Although Proposition 98 specifies that colleges receive about 11 percent of the general fund budget, lawmakers routinely suspend the rules and give them less. That means the San Diego Community College District, Southwestern and Grossmont-Cuyamaca are obliged to squeeze their sparse budgets still further.

Taken together, these three colleges enroll 39 percent of the county's high school graduates, many of whom are struggling financially. Factor in the thousands of older college students, many of whom have lost their jobs and are looking to learn new skills to get back into the work force, and one begins to appreciate the unfairness of the funding formula.

When times get tough economically, the state's community colleges become an even more valuable resource because they enable low-income people to retrain or sharpen their job skills. The colleges provide a wide array of classes at a fraction of the state funding allocated to the University of California and the California State University systems.

There are two legislative proposals that would raise community college fees from $15 to $18 per unit. But as matters stand, the additional monies would go into the state general fund – not to the colleges themselves. This is insane. Simple justice demands that the poorer colleges be allowed to retain the fee increases to help ease their budget pain, and that the state equalize the funding formula for all 108 community colleges.