State auditor: Calbright has to get better or shut down
Calbright College may be flunking out.
On Tuesday, a scathing report from the state auditor ripped the embattled online community college for failing to live up to its ideals. Among the key findings: Most of its students have dropped out or halted their academic progress and Calbright has no process to ensure its students obtain good jobs.
Calbright, created in 2018, has never enjoyed legislative support. Its first champion, former Gov. Jerry Brown, and his successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, have each muscled the experimental institution over the annual budget finish line, upsetting faculty groups and unions that call the college a boondoggle and say it siphons money from existing and beleaguered community colleges.
And although a leadership shakeup is leading to positive changes, Calbright still lacks “adequate goals,” wrote California State Auditor Elaine Howle.
“We determined that Calbright’s potential value to the State is significant,” the audit reads.
But… there’s always a but.
If the college doesn’t conduct “meaningful implementation” of the auditor’s proposed reforms by the end of next year, “we recommend that the Legislature eliminate the college,” the auditor wrote. Calbright has enrolled 904 students since it started but only 12 have graduated by the end of its first year, the audit said — nowhere close to the 2.5 million California adults ages 25 to 34 with some or no college experience that Calbright was created to serve.
It’s the latest salvo against Calbright, coming one week after the state Assembly voted 71-0 to defund the college by 2024, freeing as much as $82 million in start-up funds plus the $15 million the college is set to receive annually for its operations.
In written responses as part of the audit report, Calbright leaders agreed with all the findings. The college was already on its way to making necessary reforms, said Pamela Haynes, president of the board of trustees that oversees Calbright. “We will meet every single requirement in terms of timeline in order to do that,” she said.
Haynes tried to distance the college’s current leadership from the audit. “It was the former CEO and executive team that were problematic,” she said.
Vision versus reality
Calbright is a free public option for students left out by traditional higher education. The college was envisioned to provide jobready certificates — not degrees — to adults with little to no college education who could use Calbright to get the necessary academic foundation to pursue a degree.
Brown, the architect of Calbright, said its initial stumbles are to be expected.
“Government is not a place normally of innovation,” Brown said in an interview with CalMatters Monday before the audit dropped. “It takes things that are elsewhere and tries to bring them into the public domain, but this (Calbright) is very innovative, and it’s gonna take a while.”
He balked at critiques from others who say Calbright hasn’t been successful. “It just got there!” the former governor averred. “I didn’t demonstrate success my first few years, either.”
But his vision for the college was always called into question by labor groups, legislative analysts and a cadre of politicians.
The findings affirm the many criticisms of key lawmakers. “I have never seen so little done with so much,” said Assemblyman Jose Medina at a legislative budget hearing in February. He’s chair of the Assembly’s higher education committee and requested the audit last year.
Last year the Assembly and Senate presented a joint budget to fully defund the college, contravening Gov. Newsom’s May spending proposal to keep Calbright funded with some cuts. Ultimately the college survived, losing $5 million of its $20 million a year in annual funding and $40 million in onetime funds.
Ongoing legislative support for Calbright is minimal, said Assemblymember Kevin McCarty at a February hearing of the budget subcommittee on education that he chairs. Calbright survives because “the governor and the prior governor who, for whatever reasons, have the shiny object in the corner, who think this is going to materialize, but it’s not,” he said then.