California has the full-time equivalent of nearly 1.7 million students attending classes in its three systems of higher education.

The prestigious University of California handles about 200,000 of those students, while the California State University system takes in an additional 340,000. But that leaves the remaining 1.1 million students - two-thirds of the total - to the community colleges.

When it comes to money, however, the proportions are far different. UC and CSUS together spend about $1 billion more than the entire community college system, most it from the state's general fund.

Four decades ago, when the state was adopting a master plan for higher education, it was envisioned that community colleges would provide accessible, very-low-cost instruction to lower-division (freshman and sophomore) students, who would then freely transfer to the four-year colleges to finish their bachelor's degrees.

The community colleges have played their designated role magnificently, even courageously, but for various political reasons have seen their status and financial support devolve. The four-year systems often erected arbitrary barriers to transfers of community college students and used their political clout to soak up operational and construction funds.

Proposition 13 in 1978 sharply reduced the community colleges' property tax base and left them at the mercy of state budgets - but in competition with the far more powerful K-12 political coalition.

Proposition 98 in 1988 solidified the latter situation, and as the K-12 establishment flexed its political muscle, community colleges were routinely shorted on their rightful share of money. And the decentralized community college system, ostensibly operated by locally elected boards and represented in Sacramento by a very weak state governing board and chancellor's office, never got its political act together.

Things began to turn around a bit for the community colleges two years ago. When then-Gov. Gray Davis almost offhandedly slapped them with another reduction in state funding, thousands of students and faculty members marched on the Capitol and the cut was reversed.

They haven't exactly become trendy in a Capitol dominated by more entrenched rivals for money and attention, but community colleges appear to be getting some long-overdue recognition for their cost-effective delivery of higher education.

President Bush included $250 million in his new budget for underwriting job-retraining programs at community colleges. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - who once attended community college himself - actually proposes to raise state financing of California's community colleges sharply, despite the state's financial problems, while cutting enrollment and state aid to the four-year systems.

The four-year systems and their political allies are howling about this turn of events, of course, but it makes a lot of financial sense to redirect scarce resources to the system that delivers the most bang for the taxpayer's buck. And it shouldn't stop there.

If we are to handle the coming wave of higher education students in an era of stagnant budget resources, shifting more of the load to community colleges makes perfect sense. Nor would it be a dilution of quality. The dirty little secret of higher education is that lower-division students receive just as good - and perhaps better - levels of instruction in the basic required classes at community colleges as they do in four-year universities.

We'd be better served to take the hundreds of millions of dollars that the University of California wants to spend on a questionable new campus at Merced and spend them, instead, on expanding the capacity of community colleges, along with a commensurate shift of operational funds. We should entertain the notion of raising fees on lower-division students at four-year colleges - and perhaps lowering them on upper-division students - to encourage more to attend community colleges. And the governor and other politicians should do their bit to encourage, in word and deed, raising the prestige of the two-year system.

The community colleges are win-win for taxpayers and students, and we should alter our official policies to reflect that fact.