This article has also been translated to Tagalog.
De Anza College has gradually reduced or outsourced many of its core services, citing “cost-neutrality” as one of the district’s guiding principles, a strategy that leaves students and staff with less support each year.
Dining Services, which the district shut down in favor of contractor Pacific Dining, is only the most recent victim of these cuts; it met the same fate as both the campus print shop by summer 2023 and the old bookstore by the end of 2021.
It’s not just a matter of cutting certain services but also cost-cutting decisions which have weakened programs, like the De Anza’s College Promise, that directly benefit students.
The De Anza College Promise covers two years of tuition for new full-time students with a 15-unit cap per quarter and a 2.0 GPA requirement; those requirements didn’t exist before the fall 2023 quarter. De Anza also ended its $1,000 book stipend after the winter 2024 quarter, leaving students on the hook for costly textbooks and equipment.
Additionally, it seems as though the district is taking steps to make it easier to get rid of its free parking policy by fall 2026.
As the district begins implementing free parking pass requirements, the new enforcement and digital cataloging system will make it easier to restrict parking to students. Once people become accustomed to registering for passes, the college could more easily introduce a fee later.
While parking fees existed before the pandemic, a shift to free parking saved students both money and stress — it should stay that way.
In economics, this type of gradual decline is called austerity.
Austerity is a policy mindset where governments and institutions balance their budgets by cutting, squeezing and selling. In practice, whether it’s on the scale of a nation or a school district, it means people lose critical services and shoulder the costs of services they once had.
A historical example was in the United Kingdom in 2008, when the government introduced austerity measures to reduce the deficit by cutting public spending and welfare programs instead of raising taxes on the wealthy.
Most students don’t feel the impact it has over their two years; after all, De Anza prides itself as tops in transfers. Losing services is a blip to students who are only here to get their degree and transfer.
But over time, these losses build up and students who stay around longer than two years feel the impact. Continued budget tightening could eventually put central spaces, like the campus center and village centers, in jeopardy. We have already lost Le Café, which was a student favorite.
When Foothill-De Anza Chancellor Lee Lambert came to the district, his goals included “finding entrepreneurial ways to raise revenue” and “promoting income-generating partnerships with business and industry,” while staying “cost-neutral;” this means running the district like a business and cutting back, which is not how a “community” college should be run.
To be clear, this didn’t start when Lambert arrived in 2023. The district had been operating under austerity long before his tenure, largely because of its budget deficit; of the budget reports the district hosts on its website, it was either actively cutting its budget or in a deficit every year except 2010-11 and 2015-16; the district even projected a deficit as far out as 2027-28 last year, though it is in the green this year by over $600,000 more than it claimed it would be.
But it’s definitely been accelerating, with district leadership hiring an extra vice chancellor last year as part-time faculty to scrape by and students foot the bill for hundreds of dollars a quarter in online “textbook” access codes that they can’t even get secondhand or for cheap, through third parties such as WebAssign and Pearson.
As Pima Community College’s CEO and chancellor, Lambert oversaw Pima selling off its community campuses in 2019 for $6 million, delayed track repairs that left athletes running in unsafe conditions and cut $15 million from its budget and 6% of staff as faculty wages fell while administrators’ pay rose — including his own, to $348,935 a year. His 2023-24 compensation at Foothill-De Anza totaled $553,354, with $82,432 in benefits.
In this era of uncertainty regarding federal funding for California colleges and universities, district leadership should not be banking on “entrepreneurship” or “making its money back” just to stay afloat. Rather than investing in large venues that most students rarely use — but that can be rented out for private events — such as the Visual and Performing Arts Center or the now-scrapped De Anza Event Center, the district should prioritize projects that directly serve students.
Instead of squeezing its students and staff, district leadership can consider more conventional and less “entrepreneurial” ways to raise money — like raising property taxes on wealthier residents within the Foothill-De Anza district. They can afford to pay their fair share without expecting the district to line their pockets like bond measures would.
Right now, college president Omar Torres is taking feedback on his draft strategic plan for the college until 2030. While Torres talks about making “equitable access and pathways,” De Anza’s students and staff want a college that holds on to its services and programs.
A college built for education, not short-term returns on investment, is one students will want to attend and see as more than just a transfer school. It’s our job as students to make our voices heard — on campus and at Board of Trustees meetings — and to remind the administration that De Anza is not just a community college; it’s a public institution that serves its community, not a private asset to be sold off.
