From the Disruption of the Pandemic, a Path Forward for Community Colleges

In Short

• Four years after the onset of COVID-19, enrollment and persistence at community colleges is rebounding, although still not to prepandemic levels.

• Community college leaders report that a key strategy in encouraging enrollment and persistence is a drive toward more flexibility in course formats, including modes of delivery modality, materials, and course length.

• Federal and state recovery relief funds were largely spent on supporting student needs, including increasing direct aid and relieving students of fines or debts that in the past would have barred them from registering or reenrolling.

• Ongoing challenges include institutional agility to address racial/ethnic and economic inequalities in student enrollment and persistence that were exacerbated by the pandemic.

• There is a path forward: As a result of navigating pandemic-era challenges, community colleges can be better positioned to reengage students, rebuild their enrollments, and leverage pandemic disruption for meaningful change.

There are questions circulating in the statehouse in California—and likely other states—among legislators and policy makers who are wondering when things are going to “get back to normal” in the community colleges, by which they may mean this: When are students going to physically return in full pre-COVID-19 numbers to college campuses, to sit in classrooms with other students and resume in-person learning?

It’s the wrong question to be asking. Three and a half years after the onset of a pandemic that reset and redefined norms for work, education, and commerce, we are beginning to understand that postpandemic recovery for open access institutions is less about a physical return than about reinvention to meet community college students where they are. That means helping them fit their studies into real, complicated lives that may include multiple jobs, parenting, mental or physical health challenges, and insecurity around food and housing.

A number of community college presidents in California are reexamining and interrogating old paradigms as they push their institutions to embrace change, motivated by the needs of their students. “What do I consider challenges, and what part of it is me holding on to old sensibilities?,” asked the president of a large suburban campus in northern California. “A lot of the angst about getting people ‘on ground’ is because that is what we are familiar with. We want to see them.”

This leader asked a different question: “Why do they need to return? The challenge is to understand what our institutions look like in the future if we take into account what students really need. If we just put the genie back in the bottle, will we no longer have cracks in the pipeline? We know that is not the case.”

Our project, Evidence to Inform Improvement: Supporting California Community Colleges in Pandemic Recovery (https://education.ucdavis.edu/pandemic-period-enrollment-and-persistence-california-community-colleges), is part of a broader, federally funded effort to understand recovery efforts at community colleges across the United States through a national network of researchers. The Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges Network (https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/arccnetwork/) is studying strategies to reverse enrollment drops, learning loss, and other negative effects of COVID-19, seeking to understand who is coming back, how instruction and other key services are evolving, and which approaches hold promise for reengagement and for addressing persistent racial inequalities.

In California, we are analyzing statewide, individual-level data and insights from qualitative research with college presidents and chancellors. Using rich, individual-level administrative data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, we are tracking overall enrollment patterns, as well as how the pandemic affected persistence over time and across different student characteristics to understand equity implications for COVID-19’s impact on student outcomes. We also use extensive qualitative data gathered from nearly 30 California community college presidents and chancellors, including semistructured interviews, focus groups, and survey data to understand how college presidents led change on their campuses before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In both the hard numbers and the more nuanced voices of campus decision makers, key themes emerge: evidence of some enrollment recovery, big shifts toward institutional flexibility to stem losses of the most vulnerable students, removal of longstanding barriers, recognition of students’ lived realities and a sharpened focus on tending to basic needs. We see encouraging signs that many institutions critical to California’s culture of broad opportunity are trying to remake themselves in a new context few imagined before spring 2020. We conclude with recommendations to help community college leaders chart a path forward.

Early Signs of Enrollment Rebounding and Student Persistence

In California, where one in every four community college students in the nation is enrolled, enrollments are starting to pick up both in person and online. Beyond already well-publicized pandemic-era enrollment drops, including particularly big drops among Black, Latinx, and male students, it is important to understand how students persist once enrolled—a challenge for community colleges even prior to the pandemic (Belfield & Brock, 2020; Bulman & Fairlie, 2022; Burke, 2021; Causey et al., 2023). Persistence rates, which were about 60 percent overall prepandemic, dropped across the board for all subgroups during the pandemic, with larger drops for Black, Latinx, and male students (consistent with enrollment drops). Persistence rates have also rebounded somewhat but had not returned to prepandemic levels by fall 2022 (Linden et al., 2022). These rebounds in persistence have been slightly larger among female students, among older students, and among Black students.

Emerging Strategy: Flexibility

Every one of the community college chief executive officers (CEOs) we interviewed told us that to stimulate rebounds in enrollment and persistence, they need to drive toward more flexibility in course offerings, scheduling, and modes of delivery. Fueled by substantial prepandemic research showing weak outcomes for students in online courses, many of the California system’s 116 colleges initially pushed to get more students back to in-person classes. To do that, at a time when many students have been demanding other options, college leaders had to steer institutions that are comfortable with traditional ways of doing business to adapt to new ones. The old, predictable stations of the academic calendar—in which students were required to register by date-driven deadlines for classroom-based courses of standard duration that conformed to semesters—are giving way to alternative course formats such as “late start” (enrolling after the term has started) or “hy-flex,” in which instructors teach to students both in person and online within the same course. In a hy-flex model, students can choose to be face to face or remote, depending on their needs, which may shift over the course of a given semester.

“Who told us that we had to do 16-week courses?” asked the president of a community college near Silicon Valley. “What are these old constructs of learning?” Another president explained, “We’re changing the way we offer courses. We doubled down on stackable, shorter-term courses—late start, quick start [all aimed to offer more flexible options for enrollment]. We’ve seen a real increase in enrollment. We are looking to change the whole curriculum around this premise: How do we change what we are doing?”

Our analysis of statewide administrative data confirms the shift these leaders describe. By fall 2021, every college in the state offered courses that were 10 weeks or shorter in each term. That same year, nearly one-quarter of student enrollments were in courses with a duration of less than 10 weeks (as compared to approximately 15 percent before pandemic onset).

Students are not the only ones seeking flexibility. “We’re facing the 5 to 10 percent of faculty who discovered they really don’t want to come back to in-person teaching,” said one president, “for whatever reason.” As college faculty and staff demand more work-from-home options, mirroring employees in many other industries, college leaders are weighing whether these desires are consistent with some level of return to vibrant campus cultures where services, delivered by humans, are available on-demand to students who need them. Illustrating the complexity of this moment, some college leaders report that, even as they push to get more employees back on campus, neighboring colleges willing to make more flexible work arrangements are having more success hiring in a competitive labor market. As one Inland Empire president put it: “The biggest challenge is finding enough people to do the work.”

The demand for flexibility in course modality and length requires institutional dexterity that is often not compatible with state regulations and collective bargaining agreements that require negotiation. Several college presidents report varying degrees of success in balancing what students want now (resembling what they can find in more expensive, for-profit colleges) with demands for predictability from faculty and staff. Other leaders report bumping up against state statute (California’s “Fifty Percent Law”) that requires a set proportion of campus resources to be devoted to the classroom. There are serious and urgent questions now about what counts as “the classroom” in an evolving world in which significant portions of instruction take place online.

Removing Barriers: State and Federal Dollars for Expanded Supports

Starting in spring 2020, community colleges received substantial recovery resources from federal and state (and in some instances philanthropic) entities. With little early guidance or evidenced-based recommendations about how those funds could or should be spent, the college leaders we interviewed initially trusted their instincts and those of their leadership teams. They also surveyed students, faculty, and staff to hear directly about needs.

Early pandemic responses focused on the “great shift” to online education and efforts to sustain operations in the context of lockdown, including provision of technology for students and faculty who needed it (Bird et al., 2022; Cooper et al., 2020; Cullinan et al., 2021). The great majority of colleges also invested funds in training faculty to offer both synchronous and asynchronous courses and in training counselors to use software designed for virtual meetings with students (Hart et al., 2021).

Supporting the health, safety, and wellbeing of students, faculty, and staff was an early priority (Aucejo et al., 2020; Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2021; Goldrick-Rab et al., 2020; Logel et al., 2021; Office for Civil Rights, 2021; Wilson et al., 2021). Three waves of federal relief dollars forced colleges to continually strategize about how to allocate and balance distribution toward health safety, institutional operations, and student engagement needs. Several college CEOs reported using recovery dollars to upgrade heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems; initiate or complete building improvements; or purchase personal protective equipment and new machinery and supplies for cleanliness. Nearly all colleges continued to use a significant share of the funding for professional development in online instruction. One college provided stipends to faculty to migrate all their course materials to fully open access in order to limit textbook fees. Others kept the campus children’s center afloat, provided meals on campus, or stocked food pantries.

As they shifted their attention to meeting broader needs—hunger, childcare, housing, course materials, transportation, mental health—a number of leaders opted to put “as much money in the hands of students as possible,” as one put it. Many relieved students of parking or library fines or other outstanding debts that in the past would have barred them from registering for courses or reenrolling. One president of a campus in Orange County cited $2.1 million in debt relief for students. In August 2022, this campus sent one-time debt-relief letters and emails to all students who had stopped out that began:

“We want you well.

We want you back at [campus].

We want you to finish your education.

We are here to support you.”

Per federal requirements, at least 50 percent of aid went directly into the hands of students. In later Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) waves, California community colleges gave an average of $1,320 to students in the form of supplemental financial aid to those demonstrating need, but there was also substantial variation across colleges, with award amounts ranging from $184 to $4,534 across the colleges. These amounts varied largely as a function of units enrolled and student financial need (i.e., Expected Family Contribution as determined by the federal financial aid application).

A More Comprehensive Approach Based on Student Realities

Some campus presidents see the pivot toward the real needs of students as one of the few beneficial aspects of the pandemic. One leader in California’s Central Valley reflected that “we finally started addressing true basic needs and looking at the resources that were needed for students. When it comes to responding to populations who need it the most, I felt like … we were doing the best we’ve ever done.”

At another Central Valley college, part of the student center, was remodeled to quadruple the size of the food pantry. Private funds were raised to augment state and federal support. This president shared, “We’ll see easily 80 students on the first day we open up each week. We get our first deliveries from the food bank and, unfortunately, they don’t last more than a few days. It is pretty obvious to us that food insecurity and housing insecurity is higher than it’s ever been.” In one San Francisco–area county, a college president negotiated to rent an entire, campus-adjacent economy hotel to house students and their families, which she noted also salvaged hospitality jobs in her community.

“The intention and attention necessary to retain students now is intense,” one CEO said. “It requires more of a concierge-type approach to students, who need to have a direct connection to someone who can be ‘their person.’ We just aren’t built for that, but we’re trying to adapt. It’s a private, for-profit model. Students want both online and face-to-face access. And they don’t want to wait. It’s challenging when collective bargaining agreements don’t align with being flexible to meet students where they are.”

Later investments included more directed supports for student wraparound services and mental health needs (a few presidents described attending to the mental health needs of faculty and staff as well). As one president reported, “We offered extra-generous funding [to faculty] for our eight-week model with ‘wraparound supports’ for adult learners. We were pretty pleased with those who took advantage of it, and… retention and success are up in those courses.” With a few exceptions, these investments largely targeted supplemental support or one-time professional development, as opposed to new personnel, given stated apprehension about longer-term funding to sustain new positions on campus.

The “Equity Gap Mirage”

“There is a difference between returning and recovering. There are vestiges of everything folks have been through during the past several years: learning loss, socialization and what it means to reengage and be part of a community that is on the ground. Where does mental and physical health fit into this? How do we account for that in the context of the institution? We don’t have strategies yet, but we are beginning to have more awareness.”

Both our quantitative and qualitative findings suggest a troubling development—an “equity gap mirage”—that practitioners and policy makers need to understand and address. Longstanding inequalities in college outcomes, including gaps in degree and certificate attainment among Black, Latinx, and some Asian Pacific Islander subgroups compared to White and other Asian subgroups, appear to have narrowed during the pandemic. This news is not as welcome as it might appear on the surface, as the cause of the narrowing appears to be stop-outs or dropouts by disproportionate numbers of students of color. For example, course retention and success rates, including in online modalities, significantly improved during the height of the pandemic (2020–2021) relative to prior years, but these higher success rates were experienced by a group of enrolled students that included a smaller proportion of low-income students and students of color, given the large enrollment declines that were not evenly distributed across student subgroups (Jaeger et al., 2021; Rodrıguez-Planas, 2022).

As the president of a college in California’s rural north puts it, “It looks like the majority of people we lost may have been those whom we struggled most to help succeed.” The loss of the most vulnerable students created the on-paper appearance of a narrowing of attainment gaps, when in fact the students most in need of the income-boosting potential of a college degree or certificate are those most likely to have gotten off the path, for now.

A Path Forward: Reimagining Community Colleges and Remaking the Case

As a result of navigating pandemic-era challenges, community colleges can be better positioned to reengage students, rebuild their enrollments, and leverage pandemic disruption for meaningful change. A path forward that includes these necessary elements is coming into focus:

1. Maximum institutional flexibility: Public colleges are not accustomed to evolving rapidly, but in a brave new world where students want multiple options for learning, colleges that move slowly may face an existential crisis. In a connected world in which students can choose to take many courses virtually anywhere, this evolution may involve painful transitions, and perhaps even closure, for some colleges that are not ready or able to meet student demands for flexibility. There are any number of private, and in some instances for-profit, colleges in the ecosystem that have been traveling this road of entrepreneurialism and adaptation for some time. The necessary flexibility is about more than just adaptive leadership; it requires faculty and staff to be at the table and state policy makers to adjust codes and regulations from a prior era. Governance structures must be nimble enough to allow change before it’s too late for institutions to transform.

2. Time and support to adapt: Colleges cannot remake themselves without time and resources to innovate. New growth opportunities for colleges and students—such as dual enrollment, adult learner programs, and the community college baccalaureate—need time to mature. In their wish to return to familiar paradigms, policy makers may be impatient with the pace of reenrollment. They should resist creating fiscal penalties or using other leverage to “goose” community colleges into an imagined return to a past that no longer exists. Best practices that emerge from the pandemic context deserve state support as federal recovery dollars wane.

3. Readiness for the economy of the future: A number of colleges are planning for scenarios in which an economic downturn erodes the job market and people look to retool or upgrade skills to better position themselves for the future. As one president on the central coast asked, “Will it be an ‘all at once, they all come’ scenario?” Colleges should prepare now for this eventuality, which necessitates smart planning and preparedness to develop or expand course offerings that are aligned to where jobs and prosperity are likely to be. By and large, this kind of planning was lacking in spheres of both policy and practice during the Great Recession. This should serve as a cautionary tale and spur states to support colleges for this rapid adaption and to build tighter connections with employers in their regions.

4. Strengthening the value proposition: While the pandemic spurred major drops in community college enrollment, college leaders acknowledge that a prepandemic student “malaise” was at play before March 2020. “They just don’t see the relevance of college right now,” said one, “especially with the increase in the minimum wage. I’ve been out stumping with various service organizations, and every chance I get to speak publicly about it: ‘Yeah, you can get a job, but we offer you the opportunity for a career that has a living wage associated with it.’ It’s incumbent upon us to really make the case.” It is time to reimagine what college offers, from student services to all aspects of courses (topics, timing, duration, and modality) and to communicate strategically with current, former and prospective students. If anything, rapid advances in information technology and automation may place an even higher premium on postsecondary credentials, and thus create more urgency around ensuring that access and success are equitable.

5. New knowledge about what works in online instruction: Leaders are asking for a research-based roadmap through this complex new ground. “Colleges need good evidence to support decision making as we emerge from a time of great stress and challenge for our students, and students of color in particular.” This roadmap should be informed by a new arsenal of research on what online teaching and learning looks like today, and whether and which kinds of remote instruction are working. The rapid expansion in online learning means much of the research, like the technology, is evolving. Colleges and policy makers alike need to understand whether and which major investments in professional development improved faculty capacity to deliver remote instruction, and whether learning outcomes benefitted as a result. This research must happen in partnership with those doing the work, with ongoing institutional-level commitments to improving teaching and learning.

6. Realizing opportunity in urgency: Uniquely in higher education, community colleges occupy an essential postpandemic space where it is possible for a large volume of students who were derailed to get back on a college trajectory, whether that’s for a credential, a 2-year degree, or transfer for a Bachelor’s degree. There’s opportunity here to lean in to adaptations borne of crisis. The rapid transformations of the pandemic era are evidence that big change can happen quickly in large public systems. Could this be a moment for community colleges to shed their “quiet workhorse” status and achieve recognition and support for the essential role they play?

In the best of times, it takes a lot to move a public system that is buffeted by a complex web of factors—student poverty, faculty dynamics, demographic shifts, elected board politics, and competition with the job market, to name a few. If there is any upside to the pandemic, it may be that the sheer shock and pace of that disruption forced a community college reexamination and, perhaps, an opportunistic renewal. From the chaos and uncertainty of COVID-19, there is an opening for transformation. While the full outcome of this shock treatment is yet unknown, the promise of colleges that are open to all comers and the economic and social mobility they afford is as important as it has ever been in a society that values opportunity for all.

Disclosure Statement

This work is supported, in part, by an Institute of Education Sciences grant (R305X220016) to the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education. 

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Notes on contributors

Michal Kurlaender

Michal Kurlaender is the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor at the School of Education at the University of California, Davis.

Susanna Cooper

Susanna Cooper is the Executive Director of Wheelhouse: The Center for Community College Leadership and Research.

Francisco Rodriguez

Francisco Rodriguez is the Chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District and Chancellor-in-Residence at Wheelhouse: The Center for Community College Leadership.

Edward Bush

Edward Bush is President of Cosumnes River College, founder of African American Men in Education and Development, and Senior Fellow at Wheelhouse: The Center for Community College Leadership.