How the Pandemic Worsened — and Highlighted — Community Colleges’ Chronic Challenges

Even as Covid-19 shut down much of the country last spring, Tracy D. Hall had high hopes for the fall. As the president of a two-year public college — Southwest Tennessee Community College, in Memphis — she had reason to be.

Historically, community-college enrollments go up when the economy tanks, as unemployed workers return to school to pick up new skills. And it was thought that Covid-19 would motivate students otherwise bound for four-year institutions to stay home and take courses at their local two-year campuses.

“We really did think that we would see an increase because of everything that had been talked about,” Hall says.

Instead, Hall watched as Southwest Tennessee’s fall enrollment plunged 24 percent compared with fall of 2019, more than twice the state average for comparable institutions. Early enrollment for spring semester is down 26 percent compared with the same time last year. When faced with how different the fall would be from what she had expected, she says, “I think ‘shocked’ is the word.”

Hall’s not the only community-college leader who faced a rude awakening regarding fall enrollment. The four campuses of the Delaware Technical Community College, for example, prepared for as much as a 20-percent increase. Instead, its campuses were down about 5 percent on average.

Data collected by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that two-year public institutions nationwide suffered the largest fall undergraduate-enrollment decrease of any higher-education sector by far — 9.5 percent. They lost nearly 19 percent of their enrollment of first-time freshmen, also the worst among all institution types.

Many community-college leaders don’t yet know exactly who didn’t show up at their campuses, but, anecdotally, there’s a clear consensus. “The students who were less likely to enroll were minority, refugee, undocumented, and low income,” says Joseph Garcia, chancellor of the Colorado Community College System. At Arapahoe Community College, just south of Denver, which has a more white and affluent population, enrollment rose 3 percent. At the Community College of Aurora, located in a lower-income area near Denver, it was down 10 percent. The enrollment patterns in the Colorado system, Garcia says, “unfortunately demonstrated that we are going to see increasing equity gaps at a time when we’ve all been focused on closing those equity gaps.”

Why did so many community colleges take such a hit when so many leaders were expecting a windfall? At the most basic level, no college president alive has led an institution through a crisis like Covid-19. At another level, the pandemic has magnified existing socioeconomic inequities, turning gaps into chasms. At another level still, the past nine months have revealed that community colleges still have work to do to better serve the needs of their students.

Covid-19 has upended many assumptions about American higher education and brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of community colleges and of the people they serve.

Community-college enrollment is typically countercyclical to the economy — many current college leaders have experienced this phenomenon during their own careers. In the wake of the 2008-9 recession, community-college enrollment ballooned to about 7.6 million in 2010, up from about 6.4 million in 2007.

But the economic shutdown due to Covid-19 was not the usual recession. When it came, it hit “much quicker and hit precisely the kinds of jobs that community-college students and their families, and many broad-access higher-ed students and their families, need just to put bread on the table,” says Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center and a research professor of education policy and social analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University. While many white-collar workers just shifted to telework from home offices, for example, service- and food-industry workers felt the economic consequences immediately. Most of the latter jobs offer low pay and few or no benefits, leaving little cushion for harder times. The average community-college student is 28, and many have families to support and may have spent much of the spring helping their own kids with online schooling.

When adult workers return to college during a downturn, they’re often trying to learn new skills to enter a new industry. During the pandemic, “there are no other industries opening up, other than, say, contact tracing or things around the virus,” says Eloy O. Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges system. “This is a very different situation than we’ve seen in past recessions.”

The idea of a surge in enrollment was also predicated on the assumption that students who were already enrolled would be able to continue their studies, an idea which was called into question early on. A survey of students conducted by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin found that 74 percent of the 13,000 community-college students who responded worked, and 61 percent of those students either lost their jobs or lost hours. On top of concerns about laptops and internet access, more than two-thirds of African American students surveyed worried about feeding themselves or their families, as did two-thirds of Latino/a students, and nearly half of white students. Roughly the same percentages were concerned about paying rent or utility bills.

In California, money from the federal Cares Act helped students in the spring. But once that money was gone, it became clear to Oakley that a big bump in fall enrollment was unlikely. “We realized early on that this was going to hit our students hard,” he says. “It’s hard to go to school when you’re trying to feed your family.”

In California, as in many other states, some community colleges experienced enrollment growth during the summer, compared with last year. While that might have seemed like a good omen for the fall, Oakley sees it now as more of a last gasp. Students who might have had trouble finishing classes in the spring because they had school-age children at home got a reprieve with the arrival of summer break. Unemployment benefits were still coming in for some. “I think many of them tried to take advantage of the courses that were being offered to help them finish courses they couldn’t finish in the spring,” he says.

As August neared, fall enrollment lagged at many community colleges, but some leaders tried to maintain optimism.

Summer enrollment numbers at Colorado community colleges had been low until just a few weeks before classes started. Garcia, the chancellor, hoped that the anemic fall numbers would also improve as summer ended. As the weeks ticked away, the system’s institutions began a last-minute calling campaign to reach anyone on the fence, who had attended in the past, or had applied, or filled out financial-aid forms but hadn’t registered. “We just called them and tried to encourage them, to tell them that, Now’s not the time to put your education on pause,” Garcia says, because when the economy comes back, there’ll be an increase in demand for educated students. “I think all that helped us to avoid big losses. But we just didn’t see the growth that we hoped for.”

What about that surge of four-year students? In the end, most of them went ahead with their original plans. While Colorado community colleges saw more such students, Garcia says, “it was nominal.”

Many colleges responded to the pandemic through the spring and summer with additional efforts to help their students and keep them on track, but it often wasn’t enough to overcome the obstacles in their paths.

Consider the example of Southwest Tennessee, near downtown Memphis. Its student body of 9,500 is 63-percent African American, with about the same share eligible for Pell Grants. Tennessee sponsors two programs that promote free community college — Tennessee Promise, which offers a scholarship to recent high-school graduates that covers all tuition and fees not covered by Pell Grants or other scholarships or grants, and Tennessee Reconnect, a similar program aimed at adults already in the work force. Hall, the college’s president, wanted something else to encourage students who didn’t qualify for either program to keep up their education, so last spring, she asked the college’s foundation to support an offer: Register for three classes and get a fourth class for free.

Only six students signed up.

Since there were few takers for the course deal, Hall asked that the money be reallocated to buy 3,500 laptops for the college to distribute to students who might not have the technology to continue their studies. About 1,100 of the laptops remained unclaimed.

“We’ve tried to just remove every possible barrier, and still we’ve had the decline,” Hall says. “They’re just not interested because life has happened.” Lack of technology, lack of child care, and lack of resources have long been factors in the lives of Southwest Tennessee’s students. “What Covid has done is shone a light on what already existed, the poverty in our community. And unfortunately, that is not something that we can address at the college.”

Another barrier facing community-college students is the challenge of attending remotely. One of the most important factors in keeping a student enrolled is a relationship with someone on campus, says Linda L. García, president of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, even if it’s just with one person, whether a professor or a groundskeeper. Making, and maintaining, such connection is especially critical during the pandemic, when students may feel cut off from peers and their work lives, as well as from campus. In the survey of nearly 13,000 community-college students conducted by the center this spring, 75 percent of respondents were concerned about feeling isolated, slightly more than the percentage who were worried about paying for school.

Community-college students can also be poorly served by online learning. “Students don’t always come to us as confident learners,” says Betsy Oudenhoven, the president of the Community College of Aurora, who has announced she will retire at the end of the academic year. “So the kind of supports that they got, what they felt in that campus environment, was really important to their success.”

Aurora’s fall enrollment is down 13 percent from last year. In phone conversations over the summer, Oudenhoven and staff learned that many students faced challenges due to losing jobs or starting new jobs or needing to supervise their children’s online schooling. Others “weren’t confident that they could be successful in an online environment,” she says.

With infections, hospitalizations, and deaths reaching new peaks, colleges are planning on sticking with limited face-to-face instruction, and that may bode ill for community colleges next semester. At Aurora, spring enrollment “is off to a really rough start,” Oudenhoven says. What she’s hearing from her staff is that students are saying, “We want to see how we did this fall before we make a commitment to coming back in the spring because we’re just not really sure how this is going.”

The outlook for community colleges remains uncertain for reasons beyond enrollment. They can be even more vulnerable to state-budget cuts than their four-year peers.

In Delaware, the state’s financial reserves allowed John Carney, the Democratic governor, to keep state budgets flat for the current fiscal year. “That was a huge lifesaver,” says Mark T. Brainard, president of Delaware Technical Community College, but “it’s not a long-term strategy by any means if the economy remains sluggish.” In Colorado, community colleges budgeted for enrollment declines, just in case. Leaders wanted to avoid cutting full-time employees, “thinking enrollment might come roaring back at any time,” says Garcia, the chancellor. While the state’s community colleges have been able to get by with some furloughs or by dipping into reserves, if students don’t return in significant numbers by next fall, “we are going to have to look more seriously at the possibility of layoffs.”

At other campuses, the immediate situation is more precarious. The 24-percent decrease in fall enrollment at Southwest Tennessee, and a similar or worse decrease projected for the spring, means that the college faces a $10-million budget deficit for fiscal year 2021 on an operating budget of $70 million. Hall, the president, says that the college has instituted a hiring freeze, canceled some temporary employee contracts, and is looking to lease some space it isn’t using. She hopes austerity measures ultimately won’t extend to full-time employees, but after years of economizing, “we really don’t have much left to cut, so it’s hard to say that people won’t be impacted,” she says. “There are just not these secret pots of money to draw upon.”

Tennessee is also one of 41 performance-funding states, with 85 percent of state support tied to metrics such as retention and student success. Nearly 50 percent of Southwest Tennessee’s operating budget comes from state dollars. “If we have a decline in enrollment, and we’re not able to perform to the best of our ability in appropriations, we’re getting hit doubly,” Hall says.

In California, state policy holds community colleges harmless for their budget losses for the moment, but Oakley is more worried about what’s at stake in the lives of students. “We are already on the brink of taking several steps back in terms of supporting low-income communities and communities of color,” he says. Failing to intervene now could precipitate “a very vicious cycle.” College leaders are figuring out how to best schedule courses and keep students engaged. Oakley is worried that if Congress fails to pass another stimulus package soon, “we may lose students for good.”

For community-college leaders and observers, one of the main reasons for hope is the incoming presidential administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. With the former vice president back in the White House, “hopefully, that will mean a renewed interest in community colleges like what we saw under the Obama administration,” says Erin E. Doran, an assistant professor of education at Iowa State University who studies community colleges. For example, community colleges benefited from the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training program, instituted in 2011, through which nearly $2 billion in federal money was distributed to two-year institutions to support job-training programs. The fact that Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, has been a community-college instructor for years bodes well, too.

The pandemic, and the disconnect between what many community colleges expected for fall and what actually happened, have highlighted another disconnect: Some of these institutions hadn’t fully adapted to how dramatically the ground had been shifting under their feet.

Many community colleges may have missed how many of their students in the spring wouldn’t be returning in the fall in part because some institutions “don’t know who their students are,” says Jenkins, of the Community College Research Center. Limited resources for advising may lie behind that lack of knowledge, but so may a degree of complacency. Many institutions, Jenkins says, “sort of wait for students to show up, see who enrolls in what classes.”

Some community colleges perhaps hadn’t fully appreciated that their enrollment had been on increasingly shaky ground for years. The fundamentals weren’t in their favor. A stronger economy and lower unemployment — even though many of the available jobs offer low pay and few or no benefits — contributed to a decline in the numbers of adults attending community college. These institutions lost 14 percent of their enrollment — about a million students — between peak enrollment in 2010 and 2017, according to a 2019 report from the American Association of Community Colleges.

All age ranges of students have declined at community colleges — except for students under 18, due to the growing practice of dually enrolling local high-school students in courses earning college credits. Last spring, when people started talking about a potential enrollment boom, “I honestly was not as optimistic as a lot of my colleagues,” says Karen A. Stout, the president of Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit organization that advocates for student success at community colleges. “Very high dual-enrollment numbers were beginning to mask some enrollment issues at community colleges.” Many colleges lost dual-enrollment students this fall as well, in part due to not being able to recruit in high schools.

The difficulty many students have had continuing their educations during the pandemic highlights how two-year institutions could serve them better. While community colleges are meant to be “the most welcoming of institutions,” says Pamela L. Eddy, a professor of higher education at the College of William & Mary and an affiliate faculty member at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at North Carolina State University, the pandemic has presented them with an opportunity for “taking that inward look to say, What is it that we may have in policies that are disenfranchising individuals?”

The pivot to online learning in March brought with it an accompanying change to provide financial-aid help, counseling, and other services online that have allowed students to continue to access them. Maybe some of those services should have been more readily available online all along, for example.

Being more responsive and accessible is one piece of the puzzle. Financial pressure is another. A decade ago, the commonwealth of Massachusetts provided 70 percent of the operating budget for Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, and tuition covered about 30 percent. Now, that funding formula is flipped, says Pam Y. Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill and chair of the Board of Directors of Achieving the Dream. Eddinger knows that her students need laptops, tutoring, and, often, food, “but how much money do I have to actually meet that need is the issue.”

Eddinger balks at the idea that community colleges are out of touch with students. “The last decade has really changed the complexion of the kind of self-reflection that goes on in the field,” she says, and expanded “the understanding of who the community-college student is, and crafting a different narrative around the priorities in those students’ lives.”

Stout, of Achieving the Dream, thinks that Covid-19 could be the impetus for a transformative moment for community colleges if it includes increased outreach to students who have been disconnected from education and improving affordability. Colleges also need to reevaluate their academic programs to make certain they’re truly aligned with local labor and transfer needs and have clear entry and re-entry ramps for both high-school graduates and adult students. Some of these changes could be costly, Stout says, and be particularly difficult in a very lean funding environment.

But the pandemic has made clear that business-as-usual is no longer an acceptable strategy. Even before March, many parts of the country were going to produce fewer high-school graduates over the next decade or so. “And yet we still, even at the community colleges, tend to market to high-school seniors,” says Garcia, the Colorado chancellor. “There’s just not enough of those out there.”

William A. Seymour would be the first to tell you there are plenty of reasons why students didn’t show up at community colleges this fall, including at Cleveland State Community College, outside Chattanooga, Tenn., where he is president. “It was very difficult to predict the impact of a pandemic that is unlike anything we’ve been through,” he says. “I don’t blame anybody for getting it wrong.”

Cleveland State lost 9 percent of its fall enrollment compared with last year, compared with a system average of nearly 13 percent. But Cleveland State had been the fastest-growing two-year institution in the state, growing by about 5 percent in fall 2018 and nearly 7 percent in fall 2019, in part due to its use over the past five years of a guided-pathways program to boost student retention and completion, and to strengthen its connection with, and knowledge of, its students. “It was a game changer, because it totally changed our culture,” Seymour says. “I think we weathered the storm a little bit better because of all the work that we’ve done.”

Guided pathways are described in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, co-authored by Jenkins, of the Community College Research Center. That report established a template that has been widely adopted by colleges: Rethink curricula and stop shunting students into remedial education to languish or into general-education courses to wander without direction. Start with the desired end points — good jobs in local industries or transfer into specific majors at local four-year institutions — and map academic paths for every student backward from there. Shepherd students, monitor their progress, and intervene if they stray off course.

At Cleveland State, the moment a potential student applies, they’re assigned a success coach who guides them through the enrollment, financial-aid, and academic-advising processes. “People will talk a lot about having a one-stop shop, a place on campus where you could go and get all of your business taken care of,” Seymour says. “With our success coaches, we made one-stop people.”

Each new student is also immediately assigned to one of seven “career communities,” such as arts and humanities, business, or health care based on their professed interests. No one is picking majors for students, but they are being steered toward a sequence of courses that will give them options and help narrow them down. It also saves students time and money. In the 2015-16 academic year, students took an average of 80 credits to complete a 60-credit degree. That average is now down to 74 credits.

Through the guided-pathways practices, Cleveland State faculty and staff members can also better connect with students and understand if they’re struggling in class, or facing challenges outside it, and intervene. “I think community colleges have always done those things but perhaps didn’t realize how much potential they had,” Seymour says. Guided pathways “make sense for all kinds of reasons, not just for student success.”

Whatever challenges lie ahead for community colleges, those who run and staff them want to learn from the pandemic and make their institutions better for students in the future. At Aurora, for example, shifting student services online this spring made it clear to Oudenhoven, the president, how time- and place-bound advising and financial aid had been before. “If we’re responsive and flexible, we can probably better serve that student in that way than if we expect them to get to campus by 5 or 6 o’clock,” she says. “We’re just trying to look on the bright side and learn the lessons from this that will help us be better and stronger, so that when our students are ready to come back, we’re ready for them.”