The jobs Jessica Brockett landed after graduating from UC Davis in 2001 weren't fulfilling.

For $12 an hour, she raised mice for diabetes studies, but they had to be destroyed when nobody bought them. In another, she punched numbers into a computer all day.

So despite her bachelor's degree in animal science and management, she returned to community college to become a nurse, using all her savings to do so.

Now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes charging students like Brockett who already have baccalaureate degrees $50 per unit to cope with the state's fiscal crisis. By comparison, other students would pay $26 a unit, up from $18.

"I feel like $50 a unit is unfair to those with advanced degrees when our economy isn't able to give a new college graduate a decent salary," said Brockett, who attends Los Medanos College in Pittsburg.

The governor's proposal isn't new. California charged those with bachelor's degrees $50 a unit for three years beginning in 1993. The underlying premise was that most bachelor-degree holders who attended community college were doing so for personal enrichment -- taking French for an upcoming trip to Europe or learning to rumba.

An extensive 1992 survey of students by the Los Rios Community College District found that 40 percent of the 1,500 respondents with baccalaureate degrees were unemployed or working part-time.

And once the fee was enacted, it seemed to limit access, a traditionally sacred idea in California's higher education system.

The first year the differential fee went into effect, roughly 50 percent of students holding baccalaureate degrees statewide dropped out, according to a survey by the community college chancellor's office.

At Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, the number of students holding bachelor's degrees dropped 51 percent to 1,714 between 1992 and 1993.

"The idea seems reasonable: When the resources of education seem limited, you want to give priority to people who (haven't had) a chance yet," said DVC President Mark Edelstein, who contends most of the people driven out were there for retraining. "They were housewives with a B.A. degree in art history and they found themselves as the sole provider of their family and they had to come back and get a degree in dental hygiene.

"To bring it back now shows a remarkably short memory."

Not all students think it's a bad idea. Sue Holland is enrolled in DVC's dental assistance program and believes the degree would be useful since she is marrying a dentist.

"I think it's reasonable -- I've been through school," she said. "$50 a unit is a lot less than I paid to go to college. I value education and there's a price to be paid for that."

Overall, community college students do pay a much smaller proportion of the cost of their education than others in California's higher education system. They pay 10 percent while students at the University of California and California State University pay 29 percent and 20 percent respectively, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

Debra Phelps, who teaches engineering and architectural graphics, thinks Schwarzenegger's proposal has some major flaws. For instance, it's easy for people with bachelor's degrees to lie and say they don't have them. The last time the state enacted the fee, the honest person paid it and the dishonest person did not, she said.

She wants the community college system to charge everyone $50 and those who can't afford it should get a fee waiver.

"Just because someone has a bachelor's degree doesn't mean they can afford to pay for it," she said.

A fee increase would make it difficult for Gary Jury, 39, of Benicia to continue to afford nursing school at LMC. His wife, who teaches third grade, is the family's sole breadwinner at the moment. The couple has a 16-month-old child and mortgage payments on their house to think about. Jury has a bachelor's degree in physiology from UC Davis but never found work that suited him or paid enough.

He likes taking care of people and figured nursing was a good career, considering the state has a severe nursing shortage.

"I'm totally against (the fee increase)," he said. "I don't think you should be penalized for going back and trying to do what you truly want to do."

Brockett thinks there are better ways for the state to find the money, such as cigarette and alcohol taxes, especially when it comes to students like her and Jury.

"Because of the nursing shortage, I think nursing students should actually be given a fee reduction," she said. "I know that fixing the budget deficit is important but so is having enough nurses to provide safe care."