Look closer at community colleges

For students who decide to go to community colleges in New York outside their home county, the decision is simple enough: They pay the tuition where they go. Since tuition doesn't cover the total cost of educating them, the state and the county of origin pick up the rest of the tab. But fiscally struggling counties are fighting to shed that expense. In Nassau, the issue has been the subject of a lawsuit. In Suffolk, County Executive Steve Levy provoked howls by pushing that cost from the county down to the towns. That struggle will continue during adoption of his 2012 budget.

But the question of these "charge-backs" should not be separated from the larger question of how well the state supports community colleges. The schools get their funding from the state, the sponsoring county and student tuition. But the state and the counties are facing huge fiscal problems, and state support has been in decline -- below 27 percent of costs. The State Legislature this year passed a five-year rational tuition plan for the State University of New York's four-year campuses. It's at least a start toward repairing the damage that the erosion of state aid to SUNY has caused in recent years. But it does nothing for the 30 community colleges.

They are crucial in this sour economy, for many reasons, including their value in retraining displaced workers for new jobs. In the 2012 legislative session, Sen. Kenneth LaValle (R-Port Jefferson), chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, promises to focus heavily on the community colleges. The charge-backs need another look as part of an overall evaluation of what these colleges need and how well they're doing.

The first burst of news on the charge-backs was Nassau County's decision to present what amounted to a $6.8-million bill to its three towns and two cities. The county wanted them to pick up the burden of what the county had been paying for Nassau students to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. It's a community college, but it also offers bachelor's and master's degrees. So the charge-backs for FIT are a huge portion of what Nassau had been paying. The Town of North Hempstead sued. In August, a State Supreme Court ruled that the county could charge the towns for FIT, but not for the costs of the higher degrees. Stay tuned. This legal battle isn't over.

In Suffolk, Levy has set sparks flying by asking town governments to pick up a $10-million-plus charge-back tab. There is a section of the New York State Education Law that allows counties to recoup this money from its towns and cities. But Suffolk town officials aren't happy that Levy tucked this away in his 2012 budget, without giving them any real warning. The irony is that Levy has often railed against the state mandating counties to pay costs, and now he's giving towns a mandate.

But this issue needs to get beyond mandate politics and get down to educational needs: Are we starving our community colleges when we need them the most? How can we bolster funding for them? Are the course offerings rationally distributed among the campuses, so that students can get what they need close to home? LaValle and his colleagues need to keep all that in mind in 2012, as they decide what to do about the narrow but heated issue of charge-backs.