State Aid to Community Colleges

As enrollments soar and state aid vanishes, community colleges reconsider their role, By David Harrison, april 11, 2011, Stateline.org: “Jud Hicks got the email late one evening in January. The following day, it said, the state House of Representatives would release a budget proposal cutting off all state money to four community colleges. One of those was Frank Phillips College, a small school in the Panhandle town of Borger, where Hicks has been the president since early this year. ‘We had no idea,’ he recalls. ‘You had students saying, what do I do? I guess my grades won’t transfer.’ News reports suggested that without state funding, the four community colleges would have no choice but to close. In Borger, a windy plains town of 13,000 people, where oil refineries and chemical plants are the main employers, that would be a devastating outcome. But the impact would be felt well beyond Borger. If Frank Phillips College were to close, the residents of a 9,300 square-mile area – roughly the size of New Hampshire – would be left without a single college or university. That scenario no longer seems likely…”