The nation's community colleges falter as enrollment plunges

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," remembered 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."

With scant advising, many community college students like Camara 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 do. Now these failures are coming home to roost.

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 to provide it. Critics contend this has become an excuse for poor success rates and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately led Camara to drop out after two semesters. He now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

Community colleges are far cheaper than four-year schools yet consumers are abandoning them in droves. 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.

"The reckoning is here," said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

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

While four out of five students who begin at a community college say they plan to go on to get a bachelor's degree, only about one in six of them actually manages to do it. That's down by nearly 15% since 2020, according to the clearinghouse.

Disproportionate share of  Black and Hispanic students

Two-year community colleges have the worst completion rates of any kind of university or college. Like Camara, nearly half of students drop out, within a year. These frustrated wanderers include a disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic students. 

Several reasons explain why enrollment has declined. Strong demand in the job market for people without college educations has made it more attractive for many to go to work. Another reason: many Americans increasingly are questioning the value of going to college at all.

Megan Parish, who at 26 has been in and out of community college in Arkansas since 2016, said 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 said, can take a month.

Oryanan Lewis doesn't have that kind of time. Lewis, 20, is in her second year at Chattahoochee Valley Community College in Phenix City, Alabama, where she is pursuing a degree in medical assisting. 

She failed three classes and was put on academic probation. Only then did she hear from an intervention program.

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"I feel like they should talk to their students more," Lewis said. "Because a person can have a whole lot going on."

Employers, meanwhile, are unimpressed with the quality of community college students who manage to graduate. Only about a third agree that community colleges produce graduates who are ready to work, according to a survey released in December by researchers at the Harvard Business School.

Community colleges that fail students can't just blame their smaller budgets, said Joseph Fuller, a Harvard professor of business management.

"The lack of resources inside community colleges is a legitimate complaint. But a number of community colleges do extraordinarily well," he said. "So it's not impossible."

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