About Geoff
Geoff Baum has spent twenty years working to make community college cost less and mean more to the people who go there.
At Pasadena City College, Geoff put students at the table.
Geoff served three elected terms on the PCC Board of Trustees and was board president twice. He worked to give the student trustee the right to make and second motions, take part in board discussion, and cast an advisory vote before the board takes final action.
Those rights are still PCC board practice today, and they are among the strongest student participation standards in California.
In Sacramento, Geoff worked to make a degree cost less.
On the California Community Colleges Board of Governors, Geoff advocated for and helped implement Associate Degrees for Transfer, which guarantee a student who finishes sixty units admission to Cal State with junior standing. As board president in 2015 he presided over the approval of California's first community college bachelor's degrees, in fields like dental hygiene and respiratory therapy, at a total program cost of about $10,000. The pilot was made permanent in 2021.
Geoff went after the cost of textbooks.
Convinced that textbook prices had become a barrier to finishing, Geoff worked with the statewide Academic Senate to pilot degree pathways that cost a student nothing in books. He then pushed for the $115 million zero textbook cost investment in the 2021 state budget, the largest state investment in open educational resources in the country. It is now rolling out at every California community college.
Geoff helped build a college leadership that looks like California.
During Geoff's time on the PCC board, the college appointed Dr. Lisa Sugimoto as interim president and hired Dr. Mark Rocha as its first Latino superintendent-president. As president of the state Board of Governors, Geoff led the national search that ended in the unanimous selection of Eloy Ortiz Oakley in 2016 as the first Latino chancellor of the California Community Colleges, a system where more than forty percent of students are Latino.
Geoff has lived in this community for more than thirty years.
Geoff is president of the West Pasadena Residents Association and has been a homeowner in the district for more than three decades.