For Community-College Students, It’s Been a Tough Year

With community colleges shedding so many students in the wake of the pandemic, the focus for months has been on who didn’t enroll at two-year institutions.

But a new report, released Thursday, provides insight on students who did take courses at a community college last fall. In short, it’s been tough for them. Juggling work and family obligations with classwork — which many community-college students do — is one thing that has been made even more difficult during the pandemic, according to the report.

For instance, the report — which focuses on entering students — shows that inadequate access to child care made it hard for one out of four women students to complete assignments, compared with almost one out of five male students who had the same problem.

The report, produced by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, also describes how nearly 30 percent of students reported that their financial situations were worse last fall than they were before the pandemic. About one out of five students said they were struggling to pay for college as a result of the pandemic, while a similar share said they had financial troubles that weren’t Covid-19 related.

The data in the report are based on a survey administered to 5,193 entering students across 38 colleges in fall 2020, although not all students answered every question.

Most respondents attended classes online last fall. But of those who attended in-person classes, maintaining social distancing was paramount for most of them: 61 percent “strongly agreed” or “agreed” that they tried to avoid situations on campus where they couldn’t be six feet away from others.

Although some predictions from early in the pandemic were that the coronavirus would shift students’ plans for where they would attend college, that wasn’t the case for most survey respondents — 77 percent of them said they planned to attend the community college where they took the survey. However, 13 percent of students reported that they had originally planned to attend a four-year college.

For more on how the pandemic affected community-college students last fall see below: