Long Beach City College used the two tiered payment system for winter semester as part of the AB-955 pilot program.

The bill allows winter and summer fees to be placed at the non-resident rate. Colleges at their maximum enrollment for a minimum of two years would be able to offer this extension program.

“Of the original six pre-selected schools to experiment with two tiered funding, two were found to not meet eligibility requirements and three declined,” said Leigh Anne Shaw in an e-mail. Shaw is the President of the Academic Senate 2012-2014 at Skyline College.

The Long Beach City College pilot program ends in 2018.

“The law came into effect in January 2014.Already there has been one school that has started the program and the classes that they offered were quite full,” said Assemblymember Das Williams, D-Santa Barbara in a phone interview.Williams introduced AB-955 last year as a way to receive an education quicker and be able to join the workforce sooner.

The bill was petitioned against and criticized for taking money from students who could not afford extra expenses from increased fees.

“One of the attacks on the 955 is that this would only be for wealthier students.Thus far the statistics prove that to be quite false.72% of the students that took the extension classes qualified for a BOG waiver,” Williams said.

“The other criticism was that it would cost too much.The reality was that the LBCC was able to offer it to those BOG waiver students at $90 per unit which is still much more than is ideal, but was much less than the opponents were attacking the bill over.”

Skyline is not affected by the bill at this time.

The pilot program at Long Beach City College began in the winter session. During a regular winter session at LBCC, the classes are 95% filled, 1,700 students enrolled, according to EdSource.org. With the 2-tiered tuition pilot, 80 percent of classes were filled. There were no numbers available to determine how many of those students enrolled used a fee waiver to pay for those classes.

Williams said that he feels “very strongly that the kind of opportunities that I was given as a community college student and then as a university student, every student in the state of California should have that same opportunity.And I’m gonna keep on fighting til every student has that same opportunity.”He added that “I wouldn’t want to do anything that hurt the opportunity of working class students in fact my intention, and I think these statistics prove it, is to enhance the opportunities of working class students.”