No one is happy with the portion of Gov. Wes Moore’s proposed budget that would cut community college funding by about $23 million. But the proposal has proven useful in one respect: It illuminated the simple truth that, while the governor claims to prioritize education, he does not mean all education.
Community colleges provide an essential service for both high school and college students, offering affordable classes and credits that can transfer to the workplace or more traditional four-year colleges. While the governor justifies his proposed cut by pointing to enrollment drops in the decade ending with the pandemic, the community college option remains popular with a huge subset of Maryland’s students, and enrollment declines appear to be reversing. Maryland’s community colleges saw an 8.3% system-wide enrollment hike in 2023, for example. And there is growing interest in community colleges among students who want workforce training, but not necessarily academic credit.
According to the Maryland Association of Community Colleges, there was a 12% percent increase in students earning workforce training certificates in 2022. These certificate programs enable students to learn a skillset and often earn an occupational certification for numerous high-demand jobs across the state, ranging from the health-care industry to the building trades, and public safety. And the association said that they were able to shepherd this increasing number of students through these essential programs thanks to Gov. Larry Hogan’s decision to give a financial boost to the system.
“Community colleges have only been fully funded under the current state funding formula for two years since the formula was enacted in 1996,” Richard Midcap, president of Garrett College, told me. “Those were the last two years, fiscal years 2023 and 2024. And our recent advances in enrollment [are] directly tied to that funding.”
This continued popularity of community colleges, especially in rural areas, has the added benefit of serving as an economic lifeline to many communities. In fact, according to the Maryland Association of Community Colleges, these institutions add nearly $9 billion per year to the state economy, and support over 100,000 jobs. In many rural areas, the local community college is a major employer.
But in the same proposal that would gut the state’s four most rural community college’s budget by more than 20% percent, Governor Moore and the Maryland State Education Association bragged about a huge, $461 million proposed hike K-12 education spending based on the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future plan. This spending hike is just the beginning of what will be a decade-long series of spending hikes amounting to more than $40 billion of new spending on the K-12 education system.
When local elected officials, like Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, finally came to face the truly expensive reality of the Blueprint for their communities, they were shocked. Last year, Scott called the expense a “gut punch.”
Now, community colleges are also facing the consequences of the Moore administration’s unsustainably expensive K-12 education spending. Sandra Kurtinitis, president of the Community College of Baltimore County, told Inside Higher Ed that this new reality felt like “a sucker punch.”
For many, the notion that the Moore administration would propose a cut in resources that help low-income and rural college students seems surprising. After all, this is a governor who has repeatedly professed his devotion to education. But the expense of the K-12 Blueprint is only going to expand. And given the undisputed influence of teachers’ unions on our state government and the Moore administration, it’s clear that as that expense expands so will the fiscal “discipline” that Moore demands from other sectors.
It seems some forms of education are plainly more influential in Annapolis than others.
Christopher B. Summers (csummers@mdpolicy.org) is president and chief executive officer of the Maryland Public Policy Institute.
