Chicago's City College Students Decry Money-Saving Policies In Packed Town Hall

By Chicagoist_Guest in News on Mar 29, 2016 8:20PM

Local 1600 President Tony Johnston speaking to the gathered crowd of professors, students and elected officials at Grace Church on the issues and challenges of reinvention at City College of Chicago, Monday, March 28, 2016 in Chicago. by Tyler LaRiviere/Chicagoist

Over a hundred professors, students, and elected officials packed into the confined Grace Church Monday evening to voice their grievances over the current state of City Colleges of Chicago, which have been embroiled in budgetary problems.

Those grievances primarily revolved around CCC’s ‘reinvention’ policy, which mandates that the colleges take a more college-to-career educational style and calls for them to become distinct from one another by restricting access to certain programs. The policy came about under Chancellor Cheryl Hyman, who on On Feb. 4 was given a vote of "no confidence" by the CCC faculty. Well over 90 percent of the faculty voted that they weren't confident in the Chancellors's leadership and felt that 'reinvention' and the increase to student tuition wasn't accommodating to a majority of CCC students financial or life situations.

Tony Johnston, Local 1600 President, opened the meeting by saying he detested the reinvention plans, calling them“assembly line” education. He said plan calling for the seven City Colleges to be specialized by offering different programs is detrimental to students, though it is expected to save the City Colleges money.

“There are students that are spending hours in traffic traveling all hours, trying to reach these campuses,” he said.

Student T’Juana Seay sees the problem first-hand. Seay is a child development major at Daley College who also lives near Daley College. By fall of 2016 she and fellow students will have to make their way to Truman College in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago if they want to continue their educations in their desired career field.

“Not only am I a student, but I am a full-time mom and I also work a full-time job, so Daley’s location alone makes [my education] possible," she told the crowd. "If I had to travel more then 30 to 40 minutes I would not be able to attend school…Daley’s location allows me to make it home to cook for my children a hot dinner, help with homework and get a good nights rest to go to work in the morning.”

Attendees also decried the recent tuition hikes at CCC. According to activists, part-time students are particularly penalized by the colleges' new tuition schedule.

“The new tuition schedule rewards students whose lives are stable enough to attend City Colleges full-time and punishes students who can only attend City Colleges part-time due to the hardship and complexity of financial or family life circumstances," The Alliance of City College Unions said in a statement. "Making the part-time student pay more and the full-time student pay less per credit hour is a backhanded ploy to abandon the commitment to open-admission enrollment that is the foundation of the comprehensive community college."

The city colleges have stated that the new tuition schedule was necessary due to the budget issues in Illinois and Chicago, however critics say that the CCC administration should take a pay cut over charging students more. City colleges media representative Katheryn Hayes declined to comment before the time of publication.

The Alliance of City College Unions will be protesting in solidarity with CTU’s one-day strike on April 1. ACCU will be meeting at 3 p.m. in front of Local 1600’s offices and then will march to the Thompson center where they will join with the CTU strike.
The author is a student at Harold Washington College.