Community colleges at perilous turning point
Education leaders look to ally in the White House as enrollment plummets
As her chemistry laboratory got rolling one winter morning, with masked students taking their stations at a pandemic-safe distance, community college professor Sherry Heidary aimed to teach more than how to separate mixtures through chromatography.
She exhorted one student to believe in herself. “You’re getting an ‘A,’ right?” she said, more of a demand than a question. Then the professor gently chided a latecomer who didn’t turn in an assignment. “Not going to happen again, right? Good.”
The lesson behind the lesson: They all belong. There in the lab, there at Union County College on the path to a degree. It’s an urgent message for community colleges everywhere as they struggle to fill classes after a shocking nationwide enrollment plunge in the fall that educators blame on the coronavirus crisis and economic and social upheaval.
“If I cannot keep them in the class, I can’t teach them,” Heidary said. “The first job is, bring them here. And make them want to come.”
Community colleges, long the unsung foundation of higher education in America, have reached a perilous turning point. These two-year public colleges, offering associate degrees, workforce training and a low-price opportunity to get started on a bachelor’s degree, had roughly 10 percent fewer students at the beginning of the school year compared with 2019.
No other sector of higher education lost as much enrollment — a devastating development for these schools that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students and are open to all who apply.
History suggests that when the economy sinks, people flock to community college to upgrade skills and résumés. That didn’t happen last year.
But community colleges now have a powerful ally in the White House, first lady Jill Biden, who is an English professor at a major one in Northern Virginia. The Biden administration is likely to push for tuition breaks and other measures that benefit community college students. It’s the broadest political opening for these colleges in the last decade.
During last year’s campaign, President Biden proposed making tuition free for public college students with annual family income below $125,000. The federal government would pay 75 percent of the cost and states the rest.
Such ideas could draw significant support from the Democratic-controlled Congress.
“We have to get this done. And we have to do it now. That’s why we’re going to make sure that everyone has access to free community college and training programs,” Jill Biden said last month in remarks taped for a virtual conference of the Association of Community College Trustees and the American Association of Community Colleges.
The first lady also disclosed plans for a White House summit on community colleges. “They are our most powerful engine of prosperity,” she said.
Leaders of the sector sense a unique chance to promote their schools. “It is quite a moment,” said Walter G. Bumphus, president and chief executive of the American Association of Community Colleges. “I know Dr. Biden, and I know the president. We’ve worked closely with them.”
Community colleges are essentially an American invention dating to the early 20th century. There are more than 950 nationwide, counting public colleges that offer primarily associate’s degrees. They are sometimes called technical or junior colleges, and some also offer bachelor’s degrees. In all, these schools enrolled nearly 6.7 million students in fall 2018, roughly 40 percent of all undergraduates.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges, said the schools have strong support on Capitol Hill.
The question, he said, is what steps the government should take. Raise Pell grants for students in financial need? Enact debt relief for those with student loans? Expand tuition subsidies for “free college?”
“There’s arguments to be made for all of them,” Ortiz Oakley said.
Fall enrollment fell 8 percent among his colleges, Ortiz Oakley estimated. Students were forced to make “difficult choices about paying rent or buying books,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’ve lost them. They had to hit the pause button.”
Growing community colleges matters not only for the economy, experts say, but also for the causes of racial and social justice. Huge numbers of students of color rely on them to climb the social ladder: About 13 percent of students at public two-year colleges in 2019 were Black, and 26 percent were Hispanic. Community colleges embody many American ideals.
“As they go, so goes the country,” said Josh Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute and author of a book on quality community colleges. “And so go communities. … Without them, we’re really going to be hard-pressed to make good on the promise of equal opportunity for a good life and a good career.”
The pandemic has proved a major setback for those goals.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported in December that enrollment at public two-year colleges had fallen 10 percent while public and private, nonprofit four-year colleges were virtually unchanged. For-profit colleges grew 5 percent. Perhaps more troubling, freshman enrollment at public two-year schools fell 21 percent.
“A horrific hit,” said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University. He said he is very worried about the colleges. “They’re a critical institution for our democracy. They serve students that no other institution does.”