Community colleges cash in on foreign students

Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross

Homegrown students may have trouble getting into classes, but Community colleges in California are having no problem finding room for foreign students who pay top dollar to come here - and provide millions of dollars for the schools.

Take the Peralta Community College District in the East Bay, which recruits an estimated 800 to 1,000 students from Europe, Asia, Africa and Israel each year, according to a new Alameda County civil grand jury report.

Foreign students pay $5,332 apiece for 12 units per year - compared with $624 for students who come from in state. The foreign aid translated to more than $4 million this year for Peralta.

“It’s not just Peralta - the jury found that everybody does it. It’s a real moneymaker,” said Jeff Stark, the Alameda County prosecutor who advised the investigation into the program’s costs.

Peralta even has its own foreign recruitment office - including a full-time director who hunts the globe for students and a staff of eight full-time and 14 part-time workers.

Community college students

The grand jury questioned whether for-profit students are, in effect, buying up class seats that could go to locals. But Peralta spokesman Jeff Heyman called the influx “good news on every front.” “It generates revenue and makes it a more interesting place for Community college students to have international students,” Heyman said. “We live in a global world.” Interesting to note that the district’s statistics show that only 14 percent of the foreign recruits actually get an associate degree within two years.

Criminal charges

What happens to the rest? “We haven’t got a clue where they go,” Stark said. “As far as we could determine, the Community college is making no effort to track them once they get here.”

Throw the book: Oakland City Attorney John Russo says he’s exploring suing some of the dozens of ‘outside agitators’ who came looking for trouble in downtown Oakland after Thursday’s verdict in the Johannes Mehserle trial.

“I want to throw the book at them and see if we can hold them civilly liable for some of the city’s cost,” Russo said.

He says he’ll talk about the idea first with District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who must decide whether to file criminal charges against the 78 people arrested Thursday night.

At the very least, Russo said he’d like to get a stay-away order to keep some of the troublemakers from returning to the city.

“People have the complete right to protest,” he said. “But that is different than using the tragedy to act out your own personal psychodrama.

“I wouldn’t even dignify these clowns with the name ‘anarchists,’ because that would suggest they actually had a philosophy,” Russo said.

“I just can’t follow how a bunch of young white people come into a city that is two-thirds people of colour and start trashing it because they are supposedly mad about racism,” he said. “Why don’t they wear swastikas and be skinheads?” Lights out: The uproar over Alameda City Councilwoman Lena Tam’s alleged leak of the city’s negotiating strategy for developing the former Alameda Naval Air Station may do what critics have so far failed to do - kill the deal.

SunCal Cos. of Irvine got hammered at the ballot box when it put its development plan before voters in February.

For a while, however, SunCal still thought it had the three votes on the five-member council needed to extend its option on the land past July 20 and keep the project alive.

That is, until the council released an independent investigator’s report last week concluding that Tam had sent e-mails to SunCal reps that “secretly disclosed confidential attorney-client” information about the city’s strategy for negotiating with the company.

Allegations

Now the matter has been turned over to the Alameda County district attorney for possible prosecution - probably forcing Tam to rescue herself from any vote affecting SunCal.

That would leave support for extending the developer’s option a vote short - and put a spike in the deal.

For the record, Tam - who has hired high-powered San Francisco attorney John Keker - says she’s innocent and calls the allegations against her nothing more than a political hit job.

Courtesy: SF Gate/San Francisco Chronicle