interviews
It's Not About Free College
by Valerie Johnson
May 22, 2019
This interview with Valerie Johnson was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Valerie Johnson, Student Senate leader, receives the Dr. Cheryl Marshall Endowed Scholarship for Leadership & Service from Marshall, former president of Crafton Hills College.
My name is Valerie Johnson. I am a second year student at Crafton Hills College in the San Bernardino Community College District. I started community college right out of high school, so I'm a traditional student. I am a child of two public educators. Both my parents went to college, so they were like, "Yeah, go to college." But a lot of it now is very different than when they went, so there wasn't a lot they could help me with as far as figuring out college. But they were very supportive.
I got involved in advocacy and student leadership upon entering community college. I knew that I wanted to make the most of my time during my educational journey, so I joined student government. That's when I realized that a lot of students are really struggling, and a lot of the struggles I had been facing were common.
I was able to benefit from the board of governors fee waiver, now called the California College Promise Grant, not to be confused with the other college promise. That was something that really allowed me to focus on the costs I was facing outside of tuition – which is the main cost for so many community college students. Because I was able to receive that fee waiver, I was able to focus on school, and focus on being involved and making the most of my college experience, instead of trying to work multiple jobs...which I did anyways. But that fee waiver was really beneficial for me, as it is for so many students, and it was really important to my educational journey.
I also received Pell Grant. I am a low income student. It has been tough a lot of my higher educational journey to balance. I don't know that I would have been able to do it without the gift aid that I received. But at one point I worked three jobs. Eventually I was able to scale back down to two. Now I work one, which I am really grateful for.
My story is not uncommon, and so many students have a tougher journey than I do. I have been able to stay on track and I'm getting out in two years, which is really rare. I attribute it to some stellar guidance I got through the counseling at my school, and also being able to do school full time, which so many students aren't able to because of the outside costs of tuition, which is why we need to reform financial aid a lot.
This problem is twofold. There's the cost of tuition – which is paralyzing, or eliminates a lot of people from the higher education conversation entirely, and then there's the cost of living, of hunger, of food scarcity, of homelessness and houselessness. When you say 'restructuring financial aid,' what do you mean exactly?
One of the many issues I have spoken to students about, and experienced myself, is the work, school, life, family balance. No one has time to work the 60 hours a week required to support themselves and their dependents, and then take a full-time course load on top of that. Let alone do well enough to maintain eligibility for financial aid and excel in their coursework.
Oour state legislature has decided that investing in higher education isn't as important as it used to be. One factor that has negatively impacted students has been the way the legislature has decided to look at college as a tuition system, and not an all-encompassing fee system. They oftentimes look at, and talk about, and prioritize, and make policies around college thinking that the tuition is a student's main, and sometimes only cost.
It's really tuition and outside fees that students are facing.
Because our legislators aren't looking at the full picture, students are getting left behind and they're falling through the cracks. They're not getting the aid they need to continue their educational journey and reach their educational goals. Because of that we're seeing students complete at lower rates, and we're seeing students unable to achieve their educational goals because of a lack of financial support.
We're asking students to do one thing, but we're providing them with the resources to do almost none of it.
To finish in two years and to do a successful transfer when facing financial struggles, it's lucky. I'm lucky that I had great counselors; I'm lucky that my parents were able to help me somewhat so that I could stay on track. I have privilege that some students don't. And I think that that is the only reason I was able to complete my educational goals thus far. So many policy makers are out of touch with the California Community College system as it is now, and with the typical California student. And that is resulting in policy that is not what students need.
Do you find yourself in a debate with people about whether or not college should be free, period?
I’m a white, female student, I come from a lower, middle-class background – the American dream used to be achievable for someone like me. But now with the way that college is, it's not. A lot of people talk down to you, think you're misinformed, and you just want free handouts. It’s typically folks who are older than us, and typically folks who had very different college experiences than us.
To them I would say, it's not about free college. It's about a reinvestment in our students by the state and by our country.
Wherever those funds come from. Because paying for college is a relatively new thing. A while back it was important for students to receive a higher education and public schools were publicly funded. Just like every student deserves and should be entitled to a PK through 12 education, those students should also be entitled to a higher education should they wish to pursue one. That notion was not supported by the legislature, and they decided to roll back support for higher education, and that roll back resulted in students carrying that burden on their backs.
Some of these institutions have massive endowments, they could have free college if they wanted, they just don't. It makes higher education seem like a less important thing when our state and our country doesn't invest in it. Because money equals importance.
What you invest in relates to what you think is important, so if higher education is going to be talked about with the importance that it is, then it needs to be backed up by the funding.
Everyone's like "oh you need a college degree to succeed in this time and era" but sometimes it’s impossible for some students. The system is set up for some students to fail. And that's due to a lack of investment from our state. California colleges used to be free. The fact that they're not now means that our state has decided to fund them less than they have in the past, and that's a failure for students.
Can you talk about the funding committee you’re a part of?
The name of the committee is the Students Centered Funding Formula Oversight Committee. I serve as the vice-chair of the committee, and the only student representative on the committee, representing over 2.1 million students in the system. The funding formula was promoted and introduced by former Governor Brown. In the past funding for colleges has solely been tied to how many students attend that college. If you have X amount of students, you get X amount of funding and that's that.
The newer formula aims to address some of the inequities students have been facing, and address completion rates. The new funding formula breaks up the way community colleges are funded into three separate levels. The large bulk of the funding is still attributed to the number of full-time equivalent students, they call it FTES. What has been added now is two other sections that have funding tied to them.
One of the sections is in regards to serving our minority students and students who faced challenges and may require some extra support. Those students look like foster students, or students who are extremely low-income, students who have experienced homelessness, black and brown students, students who basically are considered minority students, and students who might need a bit more help in order for them to continue and advance their educational journey and reach their educational goals. By tying funding to that, it incentivizes campuses and colleges to address those students and support them like they need.
Because, like I said earlier, when you tie funding to something it is because you care about it and it's a priority to you.
Tying funding to serving our most vulnerable students is a huge step in the right direction because it forces colleges to acknowledge some of the shortcomings of their work to serve those students, and actively work to bridge those gaps.
The last section is in regards to completion. One problem that was, and still is rampant in the community colleges, is schools will work very hard to get students in the door. They will provide all the support at the beginning or before the semester in order to make sure the student knows what's going on, orientation, or whatever. They get their butts in those seats.
Once those butts are in those seats, we see that the support stops. Because that's where the funding is tied. Once you get the butt in the seat, the funding is there and it's yours and you can have it. So that's what colleges have been working so hard to do.
This new metric is tied to completion so that there's a point system. An associate's degree awarded to a student would be tied to funding for the school. This is also in regards to certificates, traditional associate's degrees, tied to transfer rates. By tying funding to this, again we're saying, "We don't want you to stop supporting students once you get their butt in the seat. We want you to make sure that those students are supported the whole way through."
I know this sounds harsh, but if we as students aren't worth anything to the college after they get our butts in the door, then they're going to abandon us because its financially best for them to go and look for the next student.
But if it’s financially responsible for them to see me all the way through, then that's what they're going to do. If colleges are actively looking to increase their completion rates because they know that its tied to funding, I think we'll see higher completion rates. Because that results in more funding for the colleges. That's that last metric.
So your metrics look like: big bulk, butts in seats. Smaller bulk, serving our most needy students, and our students who require the most support. Last bulk, completion and rates of completion. The funding formula oversight committee is charged with providing recommendations to the legislator for the implementation of the formula. There has been a lot of response in regards to the formula, and that response has been varied. We've had many different inputs from many different constituents and stakeholder groups. That feedback helps us determine recommendations that we provide to the legislator.
We are tasked with, basically, making sure the formula works like it's supposed to, and providing recommendations to the legislator on how they can tweak it to be the most effective.
interviews
The Life Work of Senator Rodriguez, Part Two
by Senator Rodriguez
July 12, 2018
This interview with Senator Rodriguez, who represents District 29 in El Paso, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place June 28, 2018. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Senator Rodriguez.
Tatti: We want to clarify the immigration conversation, because what we’re hearing is actually a conflation of lots of issues, and I think it’s detrimental to a real debate about policy.
Sen. Rodriguez: Exactly, you're question earlier was, do you think that there was confusion about the various policies? And the answer is, there is confusion in the American mind. People in any place out of the border, who don't have a sense of what the border is like, what life on the border is like, the reality of border communities, all their impressions of border and border people like myself and immigrants are negative because of the purposeful misinformation that is being put out by politicians and others who are anti-immigrant.
There is no question that there's conflation of refugee versus regular economic immigrants coming in from Mexico or any place else, versus border security with regard to the cartels, human smugglers, the criminal elements, and the category of terrorists.
We never had terrorists come through the Southern border. With regard to the Central American refugees, those are people who the public needs to generally understand are either seeking asylum or are refugees running away from violence or persecution in their countries.
Under our federal laws, long standing policy, international law, anybody who is seeking asylum or refugee status, can legally come up to our ports of entry and legally enter and make an application. They’re supposed to be allowed to be in the country during the period of time that their application winds its way until a final decision. In the meantime when they're here, they're placed with relatives, they’re placed with organizations that care for refugees and people seeking asylum. That's been the long standing policy and process until now. Now we are criminalizing people seeking asylum, everyday I see the headlines, including this morning, of the border patrol stopping people at the middle of the ports of entry, but they have a right to come over and petition, and they’re keeping them from coming over and coming in to petition. Then with the zero tolerance policy under Trump, now separating the children from the mothers, filing criminal charges against the mothers who are seeking asylum status.
With regard to Mexican immigrants, economic immigrants, the long standing migration of Mexicans into this country because of what I said earlier, the demand for labor, what the immigration experts call the push pull factors of economic reality. We need labor? We welcome them in. We don't need them anymore, we push them out.
With respect to whether or not we need comprehensive immigration reform, what do we do with people who have been here without documents for all these years? The estimates have been from 11 to 12 million.
I did some of that work. Pro-bono legalization appeals for some of those who were eligible. A lot of my farm worker clients for example, who have been here without documentation, working for years, paying taxes, contributing to the economy, we got them green cards, permanent legal, permanent resident status.
We have moved from that attitude towards legalization, to a time when amnesty is a bad word for republicans and where we are treating everybody under Trump as a criminal, as a rapist, as a person that should not be tolerated in this country.
All of the rhetoric about immigrants being criminals and harming people and taking jobs away, has caused us to lose sight of doing a humane comprehensive immigration reform that we tried to do several times in the past. The latest one being back in 2006. We did it under Reagan, the Simpson–Mazzoli Act. It was the 1986 immigration reform, what was referred to the Simpson–Mazzoli Act because of the legislators in the senate that passed it.
We've always said that we were going to provide several prongs to comprehensive immigration reform. Legalize the people that are here already, that have paid taxes, that haven't committed crimes, that are contributing to society and of course I always throw in have learned English. Fine. There was the legalization part of it, there was the guest worker part of it to provide permits for workers that were needed by the farmers, by the industry. That was another aspect to it.
The third aspect was to look at our visa system and see what reforms we could make with it. If you are a legal permanent resident, you want to have your parents or your brothers or relatives because our policy on immigration has always been based on family reunification, family ties get priority, now we've gone away from that. The immigration system got so bogged down that they took 10, 20 years for people to bring a relative into the country.
We have gotten away from those because now any discussion about comprehensive immigration reform, even with respect to the dreamers, the republicans don't want to allow them to have citizenship status down the line. That's new. That's something that a lot of people don't pick up on. You guys should emphasize. It used to be that when we talked about comprehensive immigration reform, including republicans on a bipartisan basis, if we were going to do a path to a legalization program we were going to have a path to citizenship. It may take a while, but you were going to be given the opportunity.
All of these things are now combined, confused, nobody distinguishes between an asylum seeker or refugee and an economic migrant and a dreamer. Or dare I say, the criminal elements. There's all these people coming over to do us harm, take away our jobs. That is an incredible shift in State policy toward immigrants in this country. We're starting to look no different than Europe that is trying to find ways to keep those economic migrants and refugees from coming into their countries.
The day before yesterday I was over there with the American Federation of Teachers and a lot of different faith organization, Rabbis, Baptists, Catholics, Muslim clerics. We were there for that last Sunday. We're going to go tomorrow. We're coordinating it for New Mexico State Legislators. New Mexico wants to do it's part and they’re bringing doctors and state legislators and Native Americans. A friend of mine who's a state legislator out of Albuquerque, filed a complaint with the United Nations and she wants to come with all of these folks and read it there at the port of entry and then come and do a visit with our Annunciation House over here in El Paso.
What gives me hope is that at these events, we have run into people from Canada, elderly people, people from Florida, from New York, from Alaska. That is what’s heartening.
Once the new justice gets appointed, of the stripe of Roberts, I'm sorry here young people, but you are going to see some hard times in terms of national policies.
A veering to the right like we have never seen in this country and the way the white nationalist movement is going, and the racists in this country, starting with the President, are going, we may be be looking at past years in Italy, Germany, France and other places where people rose against the different people in this country. Whether your difference is color, whether your difference is your sexual orientation, whether your difference is your religion. I'm painting I know a very black dire scenario, but I'm a student of history, I like politics.
I'm a policy wonk and I know what people have gone through in world history and in this country and what we can expect, if we as people do not rise and assert ourselves.
Finally, your question about Beto and Cruz debating, I don't expect that Cruz is going to want to debate him on the immigration issue. If he does, he's just gonna stay to a very canned message. He files a bill himself to try to keep families from being separated so he can then in the campaign say, I don't support families being separated. Yes, but he supports the President block step and the President is separating families. So he should be held accountable regardless of what he says or what he does. That's my view on Mr. Cruz.