EDITORIAL FEE RELIEF HOPEFULLY, GOVERNOR WILL DO THE SAME FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES.

IN November, the news from the University of California regents didn't inspire much thankfulness in the minds of the nearly 200,000 UC students. For a fifth straight year, the regents had voted to raise student fees, for a total of 79 percent.

It was extremely impolitic timing for the regents. For one thing, the revenue for the upcoming year wasn't yet clear. It was by no means certain the UCs would need a fee increase at all. Moreover, extravagant salaries and spending on the part of some top UC officials had come under scrutiny by an investigation in the San Francisco Chronicle.

This was hardly a good time to sock it to students again.

Now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that, thanks to higher revenue than projected, there will be no fee increase this year for University of California or California State University students. On top of that, he will add $12 million to the Cal Grant scholarship program, which helps students attending private colleges.

This was good news for the state's higher-education system, which has seen steadily rising fees for years, making college less accessible to lower-income families. No doubt it will help boost Schwarzenegger's flagging popularity with the populace.

But we hope that when the time comes, Schwarzenegger will have similar compassion for the state's largest pool of public college students - the some 1.6 million who attend one of California's 109 community colleges.

Whereas the CSU and UC schools collectively enroll about 700,000 students a year, the community colleges enroll about 1.6 million. Roughly 60 percent of CSU graduates and 40 percent of UC graduates began their academic careers at community colleges. And community colleges tend to enroll many lower-income and working students struggling to make a better life for themselves.

The community colleges are a crucial element in the state's higher educational system. At the very least, they should get the same consideration for fee relief as the state's university students.