Community Colleges Join Race for Funds

Santa Monica College officials asked alumnus Dustin Hoffman to launch the institution’s $25-million fund-raising campaign last week, betting that the actor would land the campus on the evening news. They were right.

As TV cameras rolled, Hoffman spoke movingly of being a lost young man with a lackluster academic record who enrolled at the college as a last resort. There he met the theater teacher who was to change his life.

“I had no idea what Santa Monica College was,” he said as reporters stood rapt. “I thought it was a place for losers.” But “without it, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have become an actor.”

The school’s campaign kickoff was a milestone in more ways than one.

It’s rare for a community college in Southern California to be swarmed by media. But it is rarer still for a Hollywood star to confess admiration for the humble community colleges, now often the institutions of the immigrant, poor and minority students of Los Angeles.

For one brief moment, Los Angeles’ ever-distant worlds of entertainment wealth and working poor seemed to fuse.

And more such moments may be in store.

California community colleges--home to 70% of the state’s public college students--are leaping into the fund-raising game, emulating big universities by tapping private donors.

Foundations at two-year colleges are springing to life around the state. Santa Monica’s new campaign is one of the larger community college drives in recent years.

And in a marked change of course, Marshall Drummond, the new chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, has put fund-raising at the center of the district’s agenda.

Drummond helped raise millions of dollars in his previous job as president of a college in Washington state, and hopes to do the same here.

Two-year institutions are entering “a new era in which private fund-raising will become a significant part of community college financing,” said Don Rickner, immediate past president of the Network of California Community College Foundations.

Drummond calls the colleges “the mother lode of need.” State funding per student at community colleges is the lowest of any educational sector. Many of the older campuses have grown shabby. Students are often single parents or hourly wage workers who attend at night. Some can barely afford textbooks. Scholarships are hard to come by.

But who, besides Hoffman, will heed the call to give? Despite the new interest in fund-raising, “I don’t have the sense of a sudden groundswell of support for community colleges,” said David Morgan, vice president for research at the Council for Aid to Education, an independent subsidiary of the Rand Corp. that studies education fund-raising.

Community colleges face an especially difficult task in attracting donors, Morgan said. Although the number of people who have attended the schools is doubtless in the millions, alumni tend not to identify as strongly with community colleges as they do with four-year schools.

Local businesses might donate to the two-year schools, but it may be harder to attract the large contributions from wealthy individuals considered key to most philanthropic efforts.

For Los Angeles, the task is particularly tricky. The district lacks sophisticated fund-raising mechanisms, said Lorraine Alexander, who runs Los Angeles City College’s foundation.

And although Santa Monica College has a cross-section of middle-class and poor students, Los Angeles community colleges tend to look like inner-city public schools. Students are primarily black and Latino, immigrants and welfare recipients. The social gulf between them and the city’s wealthiest residents is especially wide.

Still, the colleges are doing what they can to track down prominent alumni. At City College, for example, those include actors Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, names likely to be high on lists of potential donors.

“We have to strongly remind people--all of us who were first-generation [college] students--to remember where they came from,” Chancellor Drummond said.

Ultimately, said Morgan of the research group, community colleges will have to emphasize a more abstract message of social good. It’s a theme that touches on issues of race and economic class--a far cry from school loyalty or winning football teams.

“It becomes about values and principles and how important has education been to success in the United States,” Morgan said. “It’s about whether democracy is going to be threatened if . . . the citizenry can’t make informed decisions.”

A whiff of that spirit was in the air at Santa Monica’s kickoff reception. There, in an opulent beach house, wealthy donors sipped wine as Hoffman talked earnestly about poor kids fighting the odds to go to community colleges.

He called the assumption that the “best and brightest” go to elite universities “an unfortunate prejudice.”

“I bought into the prejudice myself,” he said. But those who attend college even though they can’t afford four-year universities “are probably the smartest kids. They are the most driven. . . . We have it cockeyed.”

It’s unclear how convincing this message will be, especially in Los Angeles, a city known for its philanthropic stinginess. Fund-raisers consider the city’s entertainment industry leaders “an especially tough nut to crack,” said Santa Monica College spokesman Bruce Smith.

But at the reception for donors after Hoffman’s news conference, there were signs that the community colleges’ downscale appeal might have surprising resonance in elite circles.

As it turned out, the party’s host and owner of the beach house, Frank Stiefel, went to City College of New York.

A successful producer, he has been teaching in night school at Santa Monica College.

“A city school at night--for me, in a lot of ways, that’s home,” he said. “It’s entirely familiar. To me, the odd thing would be to walk through the campus of USC.”

Across the room, Leslie Pam, a radio personality and philanthropist, was talking of his years at Los Angeles Valley College. His wife, Ann Christie, is the daughter of an Ellis Island immigrant who made his fortune in molded plastic. She said he would never give a penny to an Ivy League school.

Both donors made it clear that the community colleges’ lack of prestige is part of their draw. “We don’t promote any of the high-end stuff,” Pam said. “We are interested in the worker bees.”