Large enrollment drop could hurt adjunct faculty

The California community college system’s dramatic enrollment drop won’t have immediate financial consequences for the 116-college system — but it could be detrimental for part-time adjunct faculty.

While student enrollment plunged during the pandemic, districts that lost students won’t get hurt financially. The state’s funding formula distributes money based partly on enrollment, but colleges that have lost students in recent years are funded based on higher and older numbers.

Those protections will be in place until at least 2025. For part-time faculty, however, the consequences will be more immediate, as they work semester-by-semester based on the availability of classes.

“We’re watching to see how it impacts part-time faculty assignments because the districts are going to give full-timers their assignments first,” said Stephanie Goldman, acting executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. The group advocates for issues of interest to the 42,000 adjunct faculty in the system, but it does not bargain for them. Local unions negotiate with each of the 73 locally elected districts that run the colleges.

The community college chancellor’s office reported to the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee that the system is facing a nearly 15% enrollment drop because of the pandemic, a loss of 318,800 students from the prior year. That put its student enrollment at 1,833,843, down from 2,152,643 students in 201920. That figure was given as a “best estimate” available at the time.

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, chairman of the state Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education finance, said that even if lawmakers had exact enrollment numbers, it likely wouldn’t affect policy decisions.

The bigger issue is that the enrollment drop is significant regardless of the exact figure, McCarty said. The current year’s budget deal between lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom included spending to help the colleges address the declines. It allocated $120 million to the colleges to increase efforts to retain current students and re-engage ones who have dropped out.

McCarty noted that California faces a college degree and certification shortage, and said reversing the enrollment trends will be necessary to change that. “It’s an important issue for the economic well-being of California.”

The enrollment declines have plagued the community colleges throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

For months, the chancellor’s office has been unable to say how many students enrolled in fall 2020 and spring 2021. A memo prepared for the system’s board of governors puts the loss at 15% but also offers an additional possible loss estimate of 9.6%.

The memo says the inability to produce an accurate figure for enrollment loss stems from its challenges in counting students in certain noncredit classes.

The college system, however, won’t face any fiscal or policy ramifications for not having an exact enrollment count. For one, the state does not rely on student headcount — the total number of students enrolled — for determining how much funding each college gets. Instead, the shares are based on the number of full-time equivalent students, or FTES, which is calculated by taking the sum of course credits carried by all students enrolled at a district and dividing that by the number of credits in a full-time course load.

Under the funding formula, districts that gain in FTES are eligible to get more funding. For districts that have suffered FTES losses during the pandemic, a so-called “hold harmless” provision ensures that they will be funded at least at their 2017-18 levels, plus a cost of living adjustment. The 2021-22 budget deal extended those hold harmless provisions through 202425. Additionally, state regulations allow colleges to use old years of enrollment data in emergency situations, which the pandemic is considered to be.

With fewer students enrolling in classes, some faculty members will inevitably be let go, said Goldman, acting executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges.

“The part-timers who maybe have worked at a certain district for decades are going to start to lose out,” she added. “They got fewer people enrolling in classes, and the first ones to go are going to be the part-time faculty.”