Free-fall drop in rolls at 2-year schools
COVID helped plunge enrollment to 30-year lows. New ideas aim to lure students back.
Enrollment at California’s community colleges has dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, new data show, a decline that has educators scrambling to meet students’ changing needs as many question the value of higher education after harsh pandemic years.
Since pre-pandemic 2019, the state’s 115 campuses have collectively lost about 300,000 students, an alarming 18% drop that could lead to significant funding cuts if enrollment does not increase.
That uncertainty has put the financial viability of some colleges at risk. But the losses have also pushed the system to an inflection point, prodding colleges to reimagine themselves in ways that mesh with students’ priorities.
“What we’ve seen is that higher education as a whole has been disrupted forever,” interim Deputy Chancellor Lizette Navarette told a state Assembly hearing last week. “We gave [students] a taste of what a flexible adaptive education meant” during the pandemic, she said. Now they “no longer want something that looks like the education they received before.”
A survey of former California community college students found that onethird haven’t reenrolled be
cause they’re prioritizing work, and 22% prioritized taking care of family or other dependents. And 29% said they had struggled to keep up in their college classes.
Community college students run the gamut from those seeking job skills certificates or associate degrees, to students transferring to universities, to senior citizens indulging their passions and high schoolers exploring college courses.
The student defections affected the entire system, from small colleges serving rural northern California hamlets to bustling urban campuses in Southern California.
Some of the steepest declines were among the nine campuses in the Los Angeles Community College District, which lost 28% of its total enrollment. Los Angeles Southwest College led the pack, with a 32% drop. And East Los Angeles College, which had the highest enrollment in the state, lost 22% of its 40,000 students between fall 2019 and 2021.
Although community college funding is tied to enrollment, campuses won’t feel the pinch until at least 2025, thanks to state and federal pandemic relief funds. But if enrollment doesn’t rise by then, colleges may have to consider faculty layoffs and service cuts, said Tatiana Melguizo, professor of higher education at USC.
“We have no idea what’s going to happen,” Melguizo said. But if the decline continues or enrollment stays flat, “that will be really bad.”
At West Los Angeles College, enrollment dropped nearly 28% between fall 2019 and spring 2021. College President Jim Limbaugh said students were enticed by employers who boosted wages amid pandemic worker shortages.
“When you have the opportunity to make over $20 an hour out in the community, they’re going to put college on the back burner,” he said.
Now the college is touting its career training programs — including aviation technology, film and television production, dental hygiene and climate studies — and enrollment has increased by 6%. “What we were doing before,” Limbaugh said, “is not necessarily going to be the best thing for students coming out of the pandemic.”
In their search for new bodies, college officials are scouring high schools for students willing to enroll in community college courses. Dual enrollment is a promising route to growth because those students tend to remain enrolled after high school. Since 2015, the only statewide enrollment increases in California’s community college system can be attributed to dual enrollment.
But colleges are also facing competition from employers whose workforce needs are propelling them to offer free training and quick entry into living-wage jobs. Colleges are trying to counter that with a list of solutions — from adding more counselors to creating affordable on-campus student housing. College leaders say they see rising demand for expanded career training, more online options and a clearer transfer path to universities.
“Many of our students work,” said Frank Chong, president of Sonoma County’s Santa Rosa Junior College, which lost more than a quarter of its students. “They also take care of their kids [and] have parents to care for,” Chong said. The college is expanding online courses to make learning more convenient for them.
But some factors are out of Chong’s control. Many students lost work when COVID shut down the region’s tourism industry, and college took a back seat to job hunting. Others dropped out because they did not want to comply with the college’s vaccine mandate when in-person classes resumed.
Historically, the California community colleges have been the largest system of higher education in the nation. After the start of the Great Recession in 2007, enrollment boomed at community colleges across the country. In California, enrollment peaked at 2.83 million students during the 2008-09 academic year, when scarce jobs made college more attractive. Enrollment plunged four years later and stayed flat until the 2020 pandemic plunge. Now the system has about 1.8 million students.
The biggest drop this time was among new students who enrolled during the first year of the pandemic. But no group was untouched. Enrollment of Black and Native American students declined at the highest rates, followed by Latino and Filipino students. A higher share of men left — 20% — although more women actually dropped out.
The system lost a third — 47,000 — of its oldest students, those 55 and older, between fall 2019 and fall 2021.
The loss of so many students is also a gut punch for the 23-campus California State University system, because half of its undergraduate enrollment is made up of community college transfers. Between fall 2019 and fall 2021, the number of students intending to transfer dropped by 20%. That cost CSU an estimated 12,000 students.
The decline “may have set California’s higher education system back” by limiting its ability to “promote economic mobility among historically underrepresented students,” according to a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
To lure students back, several community colleges have focused on career training programs.
One of the system’s bright spots is the Kern Community College District in the Central Valley. Its largest campus, Bakersfield College, lost comparatively few students. And the district as a whole is now seeing a 10% increase compared with last year, including a 26% increase among Black students and 16% for Latino students.
Its strategy is to do a lot differently, Chancellor Sonya Christian told lawmakers at a hearing last week. The Kern district has expanded work-based learning by partnering with local employers for internships and apprenticeships, key to retaining Black and Latino students. And the district’s faculty, counselors and financial-aid specialists work together on “customized outreach” that considers each student’s needs. “A one-size-fits-all approach is a thing of the past,” Christian said.
In Orange County, Santa Ana College is following a similar path, improving its noncredit programs in auto mechanics, information technology and hospitality, and offering the classes online to give students more autonomy. After a 22% drop between fall 2019 and fall 2020, enrollment has begun to rebound.
“Many people during the pandemic have been looking for ways to upskill,” said college Vice President Jeff Lamb. “So we said, ‘Hey, we can help you develop some 21st century workplace skills ... and by the way, you can do that online.’ ”
But new courses and modes of learning aren’t always enough. Pasadena City College, which lost 32% of its students between spring 2019 and spring 2022, is hoping to boost enrollment by focusing on students’ social, emotional and financial needs.
The goal is to “help students in whatever they’re facing that is threatening their enrollment,” said Cynthia Olivo, the school’s assistant superintendent of student services.
The college created a care center during the pandemic, partnering with community groups to provide students with housing resources, immigration services and mental health counseling. The campus has a food pantry and offers meal delivery service. And students facing eviction or struggling to pay bills can get hotel vouchers or emergency aid.
The efforts may be paying dividends: This fall, more than 23,800 students are enrolled at PCC — nearly 5,000 more than last spring.
“But that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear,” Olivo said. “We still have to put practices in place that honor and recognize that students have been through a difficult time.”
The system has weathered drops before, but it wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that students began to quit in unprecedented numbers.
David Tellez was among the students who left.
After graduating from Azusa High School, Tellez enrolled in fall 2020 at Citrus College down the street from his family’s home. The affordability appealed to Tellez; he could have his enrollment fees at Citrus waived through the California College Promise, a program for new full-time students. But balancing a full slate of classes with his fulltime job at a fast-food restaurant quickly became overwhelming.
He needed the job to financially help his mother, a grocery store worker, with rent and food for him and his younger sisters. On weekdays, after returning home from work at 11 p.m., he’d stay up until 2 a.m. to finish homework, then log on to class at 8 a.m. “I was always physically and mentally drained,” he recalled.
Tellez left Citrus College in October 2020 and still agonizes over the decision. “I wish I could have stayed in school rather than work,” the 21-year-old says now. “I didn’t want to be seen as a college dropout.”
And Tellez is not giving up. He returned to Citrus in fall 2021 to pursue a degree in kinesiology and plans to become a physical therapist. This time, he’s taking classes part time and scaled back at work to 30 hours a week.
But finances and family needs aren’t the only things running students off. Given the abrupt shift in the college-going culture once campuses shut down, some students soured on the experience.
Angel Lozano spent one term at East Los Angeles College in 2021 and doubts he will make his way back. He left to find work and pursue an acting career. He’s not sure college is a good fit for him.
“For me and my generation, we’ve been told that we have to go to college. That it’s the safe, respectable way of getting money and all that,” Lozano said. “But now that we’ve grown up, we realize, no, there’s other ways. And that’s not to say college is a bad thing, it’s just college isn’t for everybody.”
California’s community colleges have not reported fall 2022 enrollment yet, but early indications suggest that the free-fall drop may be bottoming out. A national study showed that enrollment nationwide declined by only 0.4% this fall.
Still Larry Galizio, president of the Community College League of California, said his talks with college presidents suggest the road back may be rough. “They think they hit bottom, but all of them say that it’s going to take time to get the students back,” he said.