‘The reckoning is here’: Where have community college students gone?

When Santos Enrique Camara arrived at Shoreline Community College in Washington State to study audio engineering, he quickly felt lost.

“It’s like a weird maze,” recalls Mr. Camara, who was 19 at the time and had finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. “You need help with your classes and financial aid? Well, here, take a number and run from office to office and see if you can figure it out.”

Advocates for community colleges defend them as the underdogs of America’s higher education system, left to serve the students who need the most support but without the money required to provide it. Critics contend that this has become an excuse for poor success rates that are getting worse and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately prompted Mr. Camara to drop out after two semesters; he now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

“I gave it my all,” Mr. Camara says. “But you’re sort of screwed from the get-go.”

With scant advising, many community college students spend time and money on courses that won’t transfer or that they don’t need. Though most intend to move on to get bachelor’s degrees, only a small fraction succeed; fewer than half earn any kind of a credential. Even if they do, a new survey finds that many employers don’t believe they’re ready for the workforce.

Now these failures are coming home to roost. 

Even though community colleges are far cheaper than four-year schools – published tuition and fees last year averaged $3,860, versus $39,400 at private and $10,940 at public four-year universities, with many states making community college free and President Joe Biden proposing free community college nationwide – consumers are abandoning them in droves. 

“The reckoning is here,” says Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37% since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC).

Those numbers would be even more grim if they didn’t include high school students taking dual-enrollment courses, who the colleges count in their enrollment but on whom they’re losing money, according to the CCRC. High school students now make up nearly a fifth of community college enrollment.

Yet even as these colleges serve fewer students, their already low success rates have by at least one measure gotten worse.

Two-year community colleges have the worst completion rates of any kind of universities and colleges. Like Mr. Camara, nearly half of students drop out, within a year, of the community college where they started. Only slightly more than 40% finish within six years. That was up by just under 1 percentage point last year from the year before.

While 4 out of 5 students who begin at a community college say they plan to go on to get a bachelor’s degree, only about 1 in 6 of them actually manages to do it. That’s down by nearly 15% since 2020, according to the NSCRC.

“When we talk about transfer students, I just want to cry. And the sad thing is, they blame themselves,” says Dr. Jenkins.

These frustrated wanderers include a disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic students. Half of all Hispanic students and 40% of all Black students in higher education are enrolled at community colleges, the American Association of Community Colleges, or AACC, says. 

The spurning of community colleges has important implications for the national economy, which relies on graduates of those schools to fill many of the jobs in which there are already shortages, including as nurses, dental hygienists, emergency medical technicians, vehicle mechanics, and in fields including information technology, construction, and law enforcement.

Competitive market

Other factors are also contributing to the huge enrollment decline at community colleges. Strong demand in the job market for people without college educations has made it more attractive for many to go to work than to school. Thanks to so-called degree inflation, many jobs that do require a higher education now call for bachelor’s degrees where associate degrees or certificates were once sufficient. And private, regional public and for-profit universities, facing enrollment crises of their own, are competing to steal away high school graduates who might be considering community college.

Many high school graduates are increasingly questioning the value of going to college at all. The proportion who enroll in the fall after they finish high school is down from a high of 70% in 2016 to 63% in 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s the most recent period for which the figure is available.

But they are particularly rejecting community college. In Michigan, for instance, the proportion of high school graduates enrolling in community college fell more than three times faster from 2018 to 2021 than the proportion going to four-year universities, according to that state’s Center for Educational Performance and Information. 

Those who do go complain of red tape and other frustrations. 

Megan Parish, who at 26 has been in and out of community college in Arkansas since 2016, says she waits two or three days to get answers from advisers. “I’ve had to go out of my way to find people, and if they didn’t know the answer, they would send me to somebody else, usually by email.” Hearing back from the financial aid office, she says, can take a month.

David Hodges, also in his mid-20s, enrolled at Essex County College in New Jersey, to move beyond the odd jobs he’d been working since high school, including seasonal gigs at Amazon and FedEx. He says he called and visited the school to try to get information about enrolling, but kept being told that he needed his mother’s tax information to get financial aid.

“I was 24. I told them that I’m an adult. I don’t live with my mother anymore. She lives in a different state,” he says.

Finally, the college told him he needed to take remedial courses in writing and math, for which he paid $1,000. Mr. Hodges ended up  dropping out after one semester.

Employers, meanwhile, are “lukewarm” about the quality of community college students who do manage to graduate, according to a survey released in December by researchers at the Harvard Business School. Only about a quarter strongly agree that community colleges produce graduates who are ready to work, the survey found.

“It’s not impossible”

Economic necessity and attention to diversity have prompted some states to try to help address the ailing fortunes of community colleges.

Michigan is trying to prod more people there to go to community colleges by providing free community college tuition to residents 25 and older. More than 24,000 have enrolled through the program, called Michigan Reconnects, and 2,000 have completed a degree or a certificate, according to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity.

In Texas, a commission has proposed tying an additional $600 million to $650 million in funding for community colleges over the next two years to the proportion of their students who graduate or transfer to a four-year university.

That’s the kind of money community colleges say they need, considering how much less funding they’re allotted, per student, than public four-year universities: $8,695, according to the Center for American Progress, compared to $17,540. Community colleges get less to spend, per student, than the average that the Census Bureau says is spent per student in kindergarten through grade 12. 

Yet community college students need more support than their better-prepared counterparts at four-year universities. Twenty-nine percent are the first in their families to go to college, 15% are single parents and 68% work while in school. Twenty-nine percent say they’ve had trouble affording food and 14% affording housing, according to a survey by the Center for Community College Student Engagement. 

Community colleges that fail these students can’t just blame their smaller budgets, says Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and co-author of the December study on employers. 

“The lack of resources inside community colleges is a legitimate complaint. But a number of community colleges do extraordinarily well,” Mr. Fuller says. “So it’s not impossible.”  

Monitor staff writer Ira Porter, Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com, and Ellen Dennis, freelancing for the Seattle Times, contributed to this report. 

Editor’s note: This article has been updated, in two places, to more clearly describe the Harvard Business School study’s findings on employer views of community college graduates.

Editor’s note: This story was produced by The Hechinger Report as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.