Con ed: how funds for community college became another Bush bait and switch.

• Author: Dryer, Alexander Barnes

President George W. Bush's State of the Union address this past January was not exactly a rousing success. Long on partisan sniping and short on new ideas, it actually led to a decline in Bush's approval ratings--the first time that's happened to a president since pollsters began keeping score. But several sentences in the speech did catch the ear of Steven Lee Johnson, president of Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. Just before calling for more abstinence-education funding and increased steroid-abuse testing, Bush urged Congress to back his proposal to increase "support for America's fine community colleges, so they can train workers for industries that are creating the most new jobs."

Those words exhilarated Johnson. "This is probably the most significant support for community colleges that I've ever seen come out of any White House administration," he gushed to the local newspaper that night. Dayton, like many industrial cities, has been especially hard hit by job losses during the Bush years. And community colleges like his--which educate half of all post-secondary students in America--are ideally suited to the task of easing the burden of unemployment, In addition to providing low-cost college education to recent high school graduates, community colleges have become the default retraining system of the new economy. Every year, they help millions of adult workers who have lost employment in industries such as manufacturing or IT to retool for the jobs being created in such fields as nursing and accounting. Moreover, many economically hard-hit cities like Dayton are located in the key swing states that will likely determine the winner of this November's election. And thus Bush's proposal to boost money for community colleges would seem to be both good policy and good politics.

Except for one thing: Bush isn't actually trying to boost community college funding. He's trying to cut it. A careful look at the specifics of the administration's 2005 budget reveals that while the president has proposed a quarter of a billion dollars for the program he promised in the State of the Union address, he has simultaneously stripped away an even larger sum from other programs that support community colleges. On balance, under Bush's budget, community colleges will be worse off next year than they am now.

This shell game is all too typical of the way the Bush administration plays with the domestic policy budget. In his 2002 State of the Union...