New CA laws let community colleges offer up to 12 bachelor’s degrees

A set of bills signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom Friday aims to rein in the topsy-turvy expansion of bachelor’s degrees at California community colleges.

But the  bills themselves caused new friction: In a last-minute shift, the community colleges that were championing these bills came out to formally oppose them after the lawmakers substantially revised the measures a day before a key constitutional deadline. 

The two laws —  Senate Bill 960 by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Democrat from Napa, and Assembly Bill 2694 by David Alvarez — allow college districts to have anywhere from two to 12 new bachelor’s degrees a year starting in 2028. The bills bake in accountability metrics: Districts with higher graduation and transfer rates will be permitted to add more degrees. The new caps do not apply to existing bachelor’s degrees at college districts. 

Today, 49 colleges either offer or will soon offer 66 bachelor’s degrees. Districts would also need to prove that there’s a workforce need in their region to justify the creation of a bachelor’s degree. The caps apply to all districts, whether they have one campus or nine. 

The community colleges opposed tying the number of degrees they can offer to student metrics, arguing that they punish districts that educate low-income students who are less likely to finish their certificates and associate degrees or transfer to a four-year university but would also benefit from more bachelor’s degrees offerings that are tied to local labor market needs. 

Other community college leaders said the bills’ numerous last-minute provisions were unclear.

“We’re being asked to … support a process that is not completely understood or vetted at the last minute, and so that’s just not great policymaking,” said Larry Galizio, president and chief executive of the Community College League of California, an association representing community college presidents and board leaders, in an interview for a previous story.

The bills directly address the central tension that buffeted relations between the community colleges and the California State University. Since 2022, the community colleges were allowed to introduce no more than 30 bachelor’s degrees annually, as long as they didn’t duplicate degrees offered by any Cal State or University of California campus. But Cal State routinely objected to the bachelor’’s degrees community colleges sought. And a few times the colleges went ahead with the degree programs anyway.

Community colleges and influential lawmakers said it was unfair to block the colleges from creating bachelor’s degrees that local students and employers wanted, especially if the existing UC or Cal State degree is at a university hundreds of miles away. Some students bemoaned the inability to earn bachelor’s degrees close to home. Many are priced out of relocating to those universities.

There are 115 local community colleges in the state, far more than the 31 UC and Cal state campuses offering bachelor’s degrees.

The bills Newsom signed Friday allow community colleges to create bachelor’s degrees even if a nearby Cal State offers a similar program, but only if that Cal State program rejects more than 25% of applicants from that nearby community college three consecutive years.

The bills also insert a process for handling an impasse between the colleges and Cal State, something missing in past law. A review by the state’s secretary of labor siding with the colleges would remove the Cal State system’s challenge to the degree. But If the labor secretary sides with Cal State, the district is barred from submitting an application for a similar program for five years.

The Cal State system, which opposed earlier versions of the bills, changed their position to neutral after the latest versions were published.

The community colleges are generally barred from duplicating a degree a UC campus offers, unless they come to a written agreement with the UC.

Newsom vetoed a related community college bachelor’s degree bill — one that he’s rejected twice before. For the third year in a row, Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat from Merced, sought a bill to allow students to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing at a community college, something they cannot currently do. Newsom wrote in his veto message Friday that the bill is unnecessary because of the two bills by Alvarez and Cabaldon he signed.

“It is neither necessary nor appropriate to authorize an additional pilot or create an exception to the framework, as this bill proposes,” Newsom wrote. “California’s public higher education segments should instead focus on implementing this newly created, comprehensive system.”