San Francisco Junior College

Date Established: 1935

Date Closed:

Location: San Francisco, California

Historical Highlights:

San Francisco Junior College was certainly a late-comer to California's two-year college "movement," being organized more than a decade after a number of junior colleges had been established in the Bay Area's rapidly growing suburban communities. While San Francisco school superintendent's Edwin Lee acknowledged that "civic clubs, women's organizations, part-teacher groups and parents of approximately 975 students per year forced to attend junior colleges in San Mateo, Marin, or eight other California counties," had begun to advocate for a junior college in San Francisco as early as 1924, no proposal excited any great enthusiasm among civic or school leaders until 1935. This lack of enthusiasm among civic and school leaders is likely explained by the facts that San Francisco's school facilities were already fully utilized and that the city's relatively small number of high school graduates could either attend one of the city's denominational colleges or take a brief ferry ride to the University of California.

However, a provision of California's 1921 Junior College Act eventually compelled San Francisco to take on the expense of a junior college. Under this provision, a student who resided in a school district that did not sponsor a junior college was free to enroll in any of the state's public junior colleges. While this out-of-district student had to bear any travel expenses incurred in commuting to the junior college of his or her choice, it fell to the student's home school district to reimburse the student's junior college for any costs of instruction. As early as 1929, San Francisco's Deputy Superintendent J.C. McGlade calculated that the 115 San Franciscans then attending the College of San Mateo were costing his district nearly $20,000 a year. By 1935, the number of San Franciscans enrolled in San Mateo, Santa Rosa, and the other junior colleges surrounding the city had increased to nearly 1,000, costing the school district nearly $250,000 a year in mandatory reimbursements.

Concluding that operating its own junior college would simply be less costly than the status quo, San Francisco's school board relied upon the California's 1917 Junior College Act (which, unlike the state's 1921 Junior College Act, did not require a voter referendum to endorse this action) and opened San Francisco Junior College in 1935.

The San Francisco school district took a number of administrative steps to limit its expenditures on its new junior college. To accommodate a potential enrollment of 2,500, the junior college was assigned space at the University of California's extension center during the day and Galileo High School between the hours of 2:30 and 8:00 P.M.. The district also sought to limit the junior college's faculty costs by reaching an agreement with the University of California, Stanford, and the University of Southern California to employ students in their education departments as "so-called 'internes' of [the junior college's] instructional staff" on a half-time basis at the nominal cost of $100 per unit of instruction. Third, the school board discontinued tuition reimbursements to surrounding school districts and negotiated with several, unspecified East Bay school districts to enroll their junior college-eligible students in the hope of gaining some $50,000 of additional revenue.

A publicly-supported junior college did not finally come to San Francisco as part of some egalitarian commitment to extend opportunity to the city's disadvantaged or to free the University of California of unwanted freshmen. This decision simply followed from a pragmatic assessment of the San Francisco school system's economic self-interest.

Sources:

"Junior College In California," School Executives Magazine, 48 (January 1929): 215.

San Francisco Public Schools, Report of the Superintendent, (San Francisco: June, 1936).

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