Old-timers remember when California was the center of a national battle over the idea — championed by Governor Ronald Reagan — ending fulling subsidized tuition at state schools. Reagan, who was not at all reluctant to accompany his arguments for tuition with robust hippie-bashing, never succeeded in charging tuition at the state’s higher-ed facilities. By the time a new batch of conservative politicians and fiscal hard times arrived in the early 1980s, so too did free college tuition in California, until today.
City College of San Francisco will be free of charge to all city residents under a deal announced Monday by Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Jane Kim that college trustees hope will lead to an enrollment jolt and more state funding for the school. Under the agreement, which is expected to take effect in the fall, the city will pay $5.4 million a year to buy out the $46-a-credit fee usually paid by students.
The funding source for the San Francisco free community college is perhaps its most interesting feature: last November’s successful Proposition W ballot initiative, which imposed a new tax on the sale of properties costing more than $5 million. In a city with insane top-end real-estate prices and some of the worst inequality in the country, there’s a lot of justice in this particular form of wealth redistribution.