Locally elected Boards of Trustees work on the district level with Presidents who run the individual college campuses.

[3] During the early 20th century, the movement to establish junior colleges in California was led by Professor Alexis F. Lange, dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University.

[4] It was under their influence that both Berkeley and Stanford started to draw a clear dividing line between upper and lower divisions of their undergraduate college programs.

[5] (Lange and Jordan's desired endpoint never occurred in California—where universities continue to provide lower-division undergraduate education alongside community colleges—but Quebec's Parent Commission was inspired by the California example to take the idea to its logical conclusion, resulting in the creation of CEGEPs.)

[6] Allowing high schools (especially rural ones) to provide two years of lower-division college-level courses meant that "students could stay at home and save money, and parents could supervise their children until they were more mature".

[6] McLane's argument to the Fresno County Board of Education resembled Caminetti's argument to the state legislature: namely, there was no institution of higher education within 200 miles (321 km) of Fresno and moving away to attend college was both difficult and expensive for local high school graduates and their parents.

Berkeley and Stanford assisted with the selection of a principal and a faculty, and 28 students enrolled in the department that fall.

[6] In 1911, the principal of the Collegiate Department, A.C. Olney, transferred to Santa Barbara High School and there created California's second junior college under the Upward Extension Act.

"[8] The United States went from zero junior colleges at the start of the 20th century to nineteen junior colleges by 1915, of which eight were based in California: Azusa, Bakersfield, Fresno, Fullerton, Rocklin, San Diego, Santa Ana, and Santa Barbara.

[9] The District Junior College Law originated with a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Elizabeth Hughes.

[12] In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was asked by the state legislature and governor to perform a study of California higher education.

[13] California again led the nation in developing career and vocational education programs in its junior colleges, using funding from the federal Smith–Hughes Act.

[15] The first published mention of the term is thought to be a 1936 article by Byron S. Hollingshead, then the president of Scranton-Keystone Junior College in La Plume, Pennsylvania.

Under the Master Plan, as implemented through the Donahoe Higher Education Act, the UC and CSU systems were to limit their enrollments, yet an overall goal was to "provide an appropriate place in California public higher education for every student who is willing and able to benefit from attendance", meaning the junior colleges were to fulfill this role.

During the 1960s, state senator Walter W. Stiern became increasingly vocal about the fact that the junior colleges were the only segment of California public higher education which had not yet been integrated into a statewide system, and proposed appropriate legislation to fix this.

As officially enacted, it states that public higher education "shall be tuition free to all residents."

The state has suffered severe budget deficits ever since the enacting of Proposition 13 in 1978, which led to the imposition of per-unit enrollment fees for California residents (equivalent in all but name to tuition) at all community colleges and all CSU and UC campuses to get around the legal ban on tuition.

Non-resident and international students, however, do pay tuition, which at community colleges is usually an additional $100 per unit (or credit) on top of the standard enrollment fee.

Since no other American state bans tuition in public higher education, this issue is unique to California.

In summer 2010, the state's public higher education systems began investigating the possibility of dropping the semantic confusion and switching to the more accurate term, tuition.

On July 28, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB2X (the education trailer bill to the 2009-10 state budget), setting the community college enrollment fee back at $26 per unit, effective for the fall 2009 term.

[31] The system is governed by the Board of Governors which, within the bounds of state law, sets systemwide policy.

[32] The Board is also directed by the Education Code to allow local authority and control of the community college districts to the "maximum degree permissible" and AB 1725 in 1974 added a formal consultation process which has resulted in the formation of a Consultation Council[33] to assure the Board of Governors and Chancellor's Office remain responsive in this respect.

The system is administered by the Chancellor's Office in Sacramento, which is responsible for allocating state funding and provides leadership and technical assistance to the colleges.

[38] Regulations in the California Code of Regulations (CCR) require district governing boards to include information pertaining to the representation fee in the materials given to each student at registration, including its purpose, amount, and their right to refuse to pay the fee for religious, political, moral or financial reasons.

The SSCCC has a General Assembly composed of 116 Delegates selected by the associated students organization at each school.

A core barrier to the growth of CTE careers is the outdated view about the jobs being dirty and low paying.

Brice Harris, the systemwide chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, then appointed a "special trustee with extraordinary powers," an individual granted unilateral powers, to attempt to bring the college back into compliance with the ACCJC's accreditation standards.