Community College to Charge More for Top Courses Students at Santa Monica City College held a rally on Thursday to protest budget cuts and a proposed two tier tuition system. SANTA MONICA, Calif. - For years now, administrators at the community college here have been inundated with woeful tales from students unable to register for the courses they need. Classes they want for essential job training or to fulfill requirements to transfer to four-year universities fill up within hours. Hundreds of students resort to crying and begging to enroll in a class, lining up at the doors of instructors and academic counselors. Now, though, Santa Monica College is about to try something novel. This summer it will offer some courses for a higher price, so that students who are eager to get into a particular class can do so if they pay more. The plan may be the first of its kind in the country, college officials and other higher education experts say, and if the college succeeds in implementing it, many other community colleges across the country are likely to follow. Since 2009, enrollment in California community colleges has fallen by 300,000 students, to 2.6 million, and many believe the difficulty of registering for classes is the most important deterrent. For generations, community colleges have been seen as a social equalizer, providing a relatively inexpensive education for poor students, immigrants and others without the skills or grades to get into one of the nation's four-year institutions, or the money to afford the tuition. So the two-tiered tuition structure being proposed here is raising eyebrows, and fundamental questions, about the role and obligations of community colleges. Will the policy essentially block some of the very people it hopes to benefit? Many students believe it will unfairly exclude the poorest students and create a kind of upper and lower class of students. The background to all of this is the financial squeeze that has affected public education since the recession led to a reduction of first federal and then state financing for colleges and universities. Since 2008, the system has lost $809 million from the state, including $564 million in the most recent budget, even as more students than ever before try to enroll. Many colleges have reduced class offerings. Santa Monica College has cut more than 1,100 classes from its fall term. David Baime, the senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges, called the Santa Monica plan "extremely rare if not completely unprecedented." But the impetus behind it, he said, is clear. "In many cases, and California most prominently, amid the recession there was a huge spike in enrollment concurrent with budget cuts," Mr. Baime said. The colleges have just maxed out in terms of how many students they can serve. Community colleges are hardly the only places suffering budget cuts. Last week, administrators of the California State University system approved a plan to significantly limit the number of students it accepts next year because budget cuts have made it impossible to pay for any enrollment increase. "Every year we look around and think about how we can serve more students, but what we have now is not working," said Chui L. Tsang, the president of Santa Monica College. Literally thousands of students are missing out on opportunities we want to give them and have the ability to give them if we just had the money. Officials in the California Community Colleges chancellor's office said that they could move to block Santa Monica's proposed tuition increase and expressed misgivings about the program. They said that it was not clear such a change was legal and that the program could limit access for students, particularly those who did not have enough money to pay for the more expensive courses. Currently, each community college class costs $36 per credit hour. Under Santa Monica's plan, the more expensive courses would cost $180 per credit hour - just enough to cover the college's costs, Dr. Tsang said.