A financial squeeze since the recession led first to a reduction of federal and then state financing for colleges and universities. Since 2008, California’s community college system has lost $809 million in state aid, including $564 million in the most recent budget, even as more students than ever before try to enroll.

Many colleges have reduced class offerings. Santa Monica College has cut more than 1,100 classes from its fall term.

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David Baime, the senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges, called the Santa Monica plan “extremely rare if not completely unprecedented.”

But the impetus behind it, he said, is clear. “In many cases, and California most prominently, amid the recession there was a huge spike in enrollment concurrent with budget cuts,” Mr. Baime said. “The colleges have just maxed out in terms of how many students they can serve.”

Community colleges are hardly the only places suffering budget cuts. Last week, administrators of the California State University system approved a plan to significantly limit the number of students it accepts next year because budget cuts have made it impossible to pay for any enrollment increase.

“Every year we look around and think about how we can serve more students, but what we have now is not working,” said Chui L. Tsang, the president of Santa Monica College. “Literally thousands of students are missing out on opportunities we want to give them and have the ability to give them if we just had the money.”

Officials in the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said that they could move to block Santa Monica’s proposed tuition increase. They said that it was not clear such a change was legal and that the program could limit access for students, particularly those who did not have enough money to pay for the more expensive courses.

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Currently, each community college class costs $36 per credit hour. Under Santa Monica’s plan, the more expensive courses would cost $180 per credit hour — just enough to cover the college’s costs, Dr. Tsang said.

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While the college is still ironing out the details, it expects to offer about 200 courses at the higher tuition price, in addition to hundreds of regularly priced courses. College officials say that nearly every class is filled to capacity and that they are asking departments to choose which courses have the highest demand so they can offer more of those — typically basic courses in English, writing, math and science.

For now, the college does not plan to offer the higher-priced courses in the fall and spring semesters, but will charge $180 per credit for all classes in the shorter winter term. Nearly every other community college in the state has eliminated the winter term because of budget cuts.

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“There is a real concern about equity here, because if there are higher fees that will only gain access for certain students, does that really address the problem,” said Paul Feist, the vice chancellor for communications of the California Community Colleges. “The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of students who are not getting access to community college — and access has always been what we are famous for.”

Santa Monica College, which has 34,000 students, is widely considered one of the most successful community colleges in the country, with one of the highest transfer rates to four-year colleges. Many students from Los Angeles choose to attend the school for their first two years as a way to save money.

California community colleges have some of the lowest tuition fees in the country. And for decades, the community college system has operated under the presumption that lower fees translated into greater access, said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley . But as budget cuts have forced campuses to dramatically scale back what they can offer, that paradigm has begun to shift.

“There’s a sense that if the colleges can generate the adequate income themselves, they may no longer be struggling with the lack of resources, because there is certainly a tremendous level of demand,” Dr. Douglass said. “It’s a much-needed conversation that we need to have — is it possible our tuition is too low? This is a very important move to push the envelope.”

One donor has agreed to give $250,000 in scholarships for students who want to take the more expensive classes but cannot afford them. Dr. Tsang hopes that will make the program more attractive.

Also, since Santa Monica is prosperous enough to have built a community college relatively rich in facilities, it tends to draw students from across the Los Angeles region. Some say such students may be more willing to pay higher tuition rates.

Janet Harclerode, an English instructor and president of the college’s Academic Senate, said that many professors viewed the new plan as having a “real ick factor,” but that few saw any real alternative. Many instructors have already accepted extra students in their classrooms, even allowing a few to sit on the floor when seats were scarce.

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“We hope that this is just a stopgap measure, before taxpayers step up and the state really starts to reinvest in the colleges,” she said.