The great diversity of the student population in California's community colleges and the 1982 cut of $30 million in the community colleges' budget are forcing colleges to make decisions regarding which courses and programs to eliminate, which students to disenfranchise educationally, and the priorities that should be assigned to courses. In answering these questions, three major criteria should be considered: (1) the value of the course or program to the individual and the community; (2) the cost of the course or program; and (3) the availability of similar instruction elsewhere in the community. If these criteria are applied, the groups that would be educationally disenfranchised, defined in terms of the student prototypes identified by the recently completed California Statewide Longitudinal Study of community college students, would include undisciplined transfers, basic skills students, and vocational students in programs that do not lead to jobs. Decisions about which courses and programs to cut, however, should be made with the aid of as much information as is available by the groups best positioned to make the decisions, that is, by the faculty, administrators, and trustees of the individual colleges, rather than by state-level administrators. (HB)