I have written about the troubles at the City College of San Francisco in the past. Last week, CCSF received notice from its accrediting agency, The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) that it was placing CCSF’s accreditation on “warning status” for ongoing governance and financial concerns.
I want to point out that the source of CCSF’s problems is not academic. The ACCJC has no qualms about the quality of the instructional programs at CCSF. Instead, the school’s administration and its Board of Trustees could end up costing the school its ability to operate.
The primary function of a college is to teach. CCSF is doing that. What’s not happening is the oversight that the Board of Trustees is supposed to provide. Specific complaints include the Board’s poor financial decision-making, and its failure to follow its own by-laws. My favorite complaint is this: the Board of Trustees is allowing the CCSF Chancellor to administer Board policies without interference.
The Trustees have turned decision-making over to the school administration, and are apparently operating on autopilot. (Where have I seen that before?)
The ACCJC has given CCSF’s Board of Trustees until January 2027 to get their act together. Prior to that, the Trustees owe the accreditor a written plan of just how they intend to do that no later than March 2025.
This is not the first time CCSF has been brought up short by its accreditor. In 2012, the school also faced the possibility of having its accreditation stripped due to deep financial problems. ACCJC chose to accredit the school for seven years beginning in 2017, after CCSF convinced it that it had put its financial problems behind it.
Accreditation At Risk Again Due to Bad Management
Clearly, that’s not the case. Sharp declines in enrollment, cash management issues, and even the inability to heat its classrooms during a fall cold snap point to serious concerns about the school’s viability. Just prior to its 2012 collision with ACCJC, the school enrolled 95,000 students. Today, the enrollment is less than half of that.
It doesn’t help that the state’s funding formula favors post-secondary institutions that serve traditional college-age students. Nonetheless, one would think that an institution with a budget north of $300M for 40,000 students could manage to keep the heat on and the teachers paid.
Allowing the administration to run the entire operation is problematic because the top job has turned over several times. That makes the Board’s strategy of giving up a little tricky.
To correct the imbalance in the state’s funding formula, CCSF would have to triple the number of credits it delivers or enroll maybe tens of thousands of new students. It could consider a massive tuition increase, but that’s likely to cause current students to drop.
It will be interesting to see if the ACCJC threats manage to engage the CCSF Board of Trustees. Currently, it serves as a dangerous example of what happens when a Board of Trustees abdicates its responsibilities to the institution and to those taxpayers who elected them.
Photo Credit: Karl Schultz
