Part-time student? The Rahmfather* says no.

(* Yes, I’m stealing this from John Kass.)

It’s well-established that graduation rates at community colleges are rather low; after all, a part of the intention behind the establishment of Arrupe College, as described the other day, was to counter these low rates, which were cited as 5% nationwide, 7% in Chicago.   And there are many reasons for this:  some students are only interested in a certificate program or a small grouping of classes, others take classes without a real plan in mind or want to try a class or two rather than make a commitment, but still others do indeed get pulled away from a program of classes and a credential that they very much want to earn because their progress is too slow, and they aren’t able to focus on their classes due to a part-time schedule dictated by family responsibilities and the need to earn a living.

Hence, the City Colleges of Chicago, that is, Chicago’s community college system, introduced a program, the “Star Scholarship,” to provide free tuition to students, so long as they begin their course of study immediately upon graduating from high school, attend full-time, and meet various other requirements.  The program is also limited to Chicago Public School graduates (including charter schools) and is funded (so far as I can tell) by general revenues, though its costs are minimized because it only pays any remaining tuition after Pell and other grants are applied.

And now, according to today’s Tribune, they’re taking this a step further, and sharply increasing the tuition for part-time students to push them into full-time status:

Starting with the fall semester, the seven-campus college system would drop its $89-per-credit-hour tuition structure in favor of a three-tier “flat fee” payment structure. City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman billed the new tuition setup as designed to encourage full-time status for students by making it less expensive on a per-class basis to carry a full load of more than three courses per semester.

But for the many City Colleges students who take a class or two per semester while working, tuition costs will rise significantly. Taking a single three-credit class would cost $599, up from $267 under the current tuition structure. Students taking a pair of three-credit classes now pay $534, but that price that would go up to $1,069. Course loads of 12 credits or more per semester would be $1,753.

Now it may be true that in some circumstances, students who earn their way through college one class at a time would be better off taking loans to cover living expenses, and paying them back with the higher income they’ll have after gaining their degree or credential.  And conceivably this is also a possible course of action for a non-traditional student; it’s a lot more difficult to cover living costs if you’ve got a family to support, but it’s doable – just ask the families living in married student housing at any university, who live on tight budgets, and, depending on the particulars, may make use of food stamps or other government benefits.  Certainly there’s no good reason for a student to take classes part-time if they have no family obligations and are even supported by their parents – well, except for students who simply aren’t able (e.g., due to a disability) to attend full-time.

But should the government be in the business of encouraging this? – of creating inducements to attend full-time, and penalties for part-time attendance?

Isn’t it almost, well, un-American to establish a policy that says, “don’t try to pay your own way,” and to penalize those students who try to do so?  In any case, there’s a chance it backfires, and scares away students who’d otherwise try one or two courses.

Anyway, because I’m just a bit nerdy, I dug up more details.  How did the tuition rates, before and after, compare with other community colleges?  What’s the overall impact on tuition?  etc.

Here’s the Civic Foundation’s report on the FY 2016 budget, which contains all the data you could want.

Some key points:  due, it’s said, to an improving economy, enrollment dropped 10.2% from FY2014 to FY2015, and is expected to decline a further 1.1% in FY2016.  In other words, the “Star Scholarship” program isn’t expected to have a measurable impact on the enrollment, except perhaps to mitigate an otherwise even-sharper drop-off in numbers.  At the same time, the budgeted revenues from tuition and fees are expected to increase by 10.4%, so this new tuition structure is not a simple reallocation that nets out to similar totals.  (Note, though, that tuition had been held constant for the prior four years.)

Also:  the sums involved in the “Star Scholarship” are not high:  the money budgeted for “waivers and scholarships” were $5.2 million in FY 2015, and have increased minimally to $6.0 million in FY 2016.  Compare this to a total dollar amount of tuition increase of $12.0 million, and total operating funds of $309.4 million in 2015 and a projected $208.0 in 2016.

As to the actual costs (page 27 ff):  only students taking 10, 11, or 16 or more credit hours will see increases equal to or less than the composite 10%, and some of the increases for everyone else are brutal.  A single 3-credit class:  a 73% increase.  Two 3-credit classes?  74%.  Even two 4-credit classes produce an increase of 35%, and 12 credits, 38%.  This looks worse than it actually is because, at least according to the news article, these figures aren’t apples to apples, but the 2016 rates eliminate special fees for certain programs.

I’ll grant this:  tuition at the City Colleges had been moderate enough that even the new tuition amounts are still not that far out of line compared to suburban community colleges — see the table on page 29 (which I’d copy over if I could).  The 8-credit cost increase of 35% still puts a student at $1069, where suburban rates range from $932 to $1,222.  For a 6-credit cost, it’s still $1069, vs. $704 to $916.50.

But even so:  fundamentally, this is an experiment.  Can a “block tuition” model boost graduation/completion rates?  Unfortunately, it’s an experiment with an awful lot of involuntary guinea pigs, and potential collateral damage.