California Community Colleges Are Changing

What We Learned This Year is a reporting series about some of the biggest stories of 2023. Read more here.

California’s community college system was hit hard by the pandemic. Even in the larger landscape of enrollment decline in education, the blow to community colleges was unique in scale. At one point, community colleges across the state had lost about 417,000 students, or about 18.5 percent of its total student population. It was the lowest enrollment for the system in three decades. For many community college students, who skew older and tend to be working people, the pandemic necessitated a focus on their jobs rather than on education.  

Colleges responded with a full-frontal marketing attack to lure students back. In San Diego, for example, advertisements for the San Diego Community College District popped up on billboards, city buses and trolleys. Enrollment has since ticked up slightly, but it remains much lower than pre-pandemic levels. 

In the face of that pressure, community colleges have begun adapting. 

Some of the changes have been programmatic: offering bachelor’s degrees and more flexible ways to earn associate degrees. Others have been related to infrastructure, like attempts to kickstart on-campus housing, once a rarity for community colleges, though a funding issue could put some of these plans in jeopardy.  

What it all amounts to, however, is a significant shift for the system as a whole. 

The Four-Year Community College Experience 

Back in 2021, California expanded and made permanent a pilot program that allowed community colleges to develop bachelor’s degrees aimed at responding to local workforce needs. It was a monumental change and one that, for many, felt overdue for a state that’s prided itself on being at the forefront of educational progress.  

San Diego area community colleges had already jumped headlong into bachelor’s degrees, with both Mesa College and Miracosta College developing degrees during the pilot program. Over the past two years, even more local community colleges have gotten in on the action.  

After a messy, yearlong back-and-forth with the CSU system, City College minted a new degree in cyber defense, with Miramar College following shortly after. Mesa is now well on its way to offering its second bachelor’s degree.  

Hai Hoang, the dean of institutional effectiveness at SDCCD’s Mesa College helped author a brief about how community college bachelor’s degrees were shaking out for UC Davis’ Center for Community College Leadership and Research. He said data on how graduates are faring is still scarce because the programs are new, but the data they do have is promising. 

The majority of graduates in the pilot program not only found jobs in their fields of study within three months, but also made tens of thousands more in earnings.  

But there’s another stat that excites Hoang even more. 

“Around 70 to 76 percent of students, according to survey data, reported that they belong to at least one special population group. That is wild to me,” Hoang said. Those special population groups include first-generation college students, veterans, students receiving financial aid and homeless students. Of the students surveyed, about 50 percent said that they wouldn’t have gotten a bachelor’s degree if they weren’t able to earn it at a community college.  

For Hoang, it all indicates that instead of a broad shift away from their traditional students, bachelor’s degrees just give community colleges something new to offer them. He hopes that new offering may spark a perception change about the quality of education community colleges provide.  

But the greenlighting of community college bachelor’s degrees didn’t come without strings. For many, the most frustrating was that community colleges aren’t allowed to create degrees that are already offered at even a single public four-year university. That means that if only Cal Poly Humboldt, for example, offered a degree, it was off the table for San Diego community colleges nearly 800 miles away. 

Constance Carroll, former SDCCD chancellor and CEO of the California Community Colleges Baccalaureate Association, has been on the frontlines of the baccalaureate push for years. She’s confident that in time that stipulation will be eliminated, and California will go the way of states like Florida and Washington, whose community colleges aren’t bound by duplication.  

Carroll is also quick to point out that community colleges aren’t the only system whose degree offerings are changing, just a few months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing CSUs to independently offer doctoral degrees. They’d previously had to partner with private universities or University of California schools, for whom doctorates were once reserved. 

“What California’s institutions can do and do best is serve their communities and serve students instead of worry about issues of turf and the like,” Carroll said. 

Hoang said the anxiety felt at CSUs over community colleges’ foray into bachelor’s degrees necessitates some heady questions, like “Why are we an educator or a policymaker, why are we doing what we do every day?” To him, the answer is clear: to serve students. That mutual understanding, he said, should ease worries that community college bachelor’s degrees are a zero-sum game CSUs are on the losing side of. 

“When we come into the conversation with the common goal of serving students and supporting students to be productive individuals in society, the data shows that we are serving two different populations,” Hoang said.  

New Ways to Educate 

Like schools across the country, community colleges were forced to shift online when the pandemic hit. While for many students, especially younger ones, those years of virtual learning have yielded performance delays that persist to this day, the same wasn’t true for all community college students.  

Greg Smith, the newly appointed chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, said the pandemic taught the district valuable lessons about what its students needed, which often included flexible educational options, like more online classes.  

“The pandemic forced us to look at ourselves in many ways and see how we need to be evolving with our students,” Smith said. “The days of a student coming and spending eight hours on our campus? There’s far less of that,” he said. 

But virtual instruction is only part of the puzzle. Smith said moving away from the traditional 15 to 17 week college semester and embracing courses that, while maybe more intensive, only run half the time is also a priority.  

Community college students are a unique population in higher education. They tend to be older, more lower-income and more diverse than students who attend traditional four-year universities. This suite of programmatic changes are all part of trying to meet students where they’re at, Smith said. 

“There’s a lot of work that goes into doing that well … it includes recognizing that our students are coming with childcare needs, with perhaps eldercare needs, with transportation challenges and then with their work requirements,” he said.  

The new chancellor of California’s community college system has put an additional emphasis on increasing dual enrollment – when high school students take classes at local community colleges. Dual enrollment has already been attributed to some of community colleges’ recent enrollment increase.

Add the new bachelor’s degrees to this, and Smith said, “A lot of forces are all coming together at the same time.” 

The Budget Black Cloud 

But things aren’t totally rosy for community colleges. California’s Master Plan for Higher Education funds community colleges less than any other statewide education system. That presents challenges for a system working to build out new bachelor’s degree programs, but to Smith, it also represents a basic inequity. 

“More than 70 percent of our students come from communities of color, and many of them living in poverty. Social upward economic mobility is happening in the community colleges more than anywhere else in our education system,” Smith said. “So, there are some inequities that have continued and evolved and grown over time that need to be revisited.”  

The other shoe yet to drop is what funding will look like in the coming year. California is projecting a massive $68 billion budget deficit. That will almost inevitably translate into funding cuts for community colleges. A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office forecasted a $19 billion deficit for schools and community colleges. That could be a significant blow to a system still trying to pull itself out of the pandemic enrollment hole.