On the heels of a court ruling last week that City College of San Francisco cannot have its accreditation revoked until the case is adjudicated in court, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi visited the school's Chinatown campus Monday to praise the decision.
Pelosi said students shouldn’t be afraid of signing up for the spring semester and blamed a decrease in enrollment on the accreditation issue. College officials said registration is down more than 30 percent over the past two years. Officials said enrollment was declining even before the accreditation decision and that CCSF has lost about $14 million in state funding over the past couple of years due to the decline.
Pelosi said she supports a federal review of how the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which last year said it would pull CCSF's accreditation this July, conducts business.
"We can subject this process to the scrutiny that I believe that it should have," she said. "We care about what happens in the rest of the country, that's for sure. But we think that what happened here is highly unusual."
Last August, the Department of Education found that the commission did not comply with a handful of federal regulations in reaching the decision to end CCSF's accreditation.