If state wants degrees, make the degrees count

Just last year, Florida's 28 community colleges were turning away students for lack of state financing. This year, their enrollment is flat, but the Legislature still is failing to pay for student growth at the 11 state universities. Yet with the state adequately financing neither, the Board of Education is pushing the universities' traditional four-year bachelor's degrees onto the two-year community colleges.

Six community colleges have established four-year degree programs since the board began letting them do so in 2001. The latest step last week was the requirement of board approval for new programs' curricula and the requirement of demonstrated need. That those previously were not requirements suggests still another education-on-the-cheap gimmick. So does the fact that there was no board discussion of financing the new plan or discussion of a plan.

More work-force bachelor's degrees targeted for community colleges could be OK. But university presidents such as Florida Atlantic's Frank Brogan are correct to question the mission creep. FAU's well-established partnerships with Palm Beach Community College and Indian River Community College, for example, are working to let students earn four-year degrees on the two-year campuses. That well-planned, cost-effective approach helps explain why neither of those two-year schools has been distracted with trying to offer four-year degrees that it cannot afford.

Mr. Brogan also is correct that any four-year program should come under the oversight of the state Board of Governors, which voters created in a 2002 constitutional amendment and gave authority to operate the university system, rather than the Board of Education, which is responsible for the community colleges and K-12 schools. But, as usual, the Board of Governors has had little to say about the usurping of its oversight. The chairman readily acknowledges that her board still is finding its way, and a citizens lawsuit is aimed at reminding the board of its marching orders, even as the Legislature keeps angling for sovereignty.

This hodgepodge approach will do anything but generate financing for the top-drawer higher education system officials claim to want to see. Instead, a miserly Legislature prefers to bestow largess on pet or ideological projects. The result is political combat for influence rather than the kind of academic discussion the state needs.

Both boards are on the Higher Education Access Task Force, created this summer to help bring about the "seamless" K-20 system promised by the governor and Legislature. Comprehensive planning should top the task force's recommendations for next year's legislative session rather than blurring the two- and four-year colleges' roles.