How did the pandemic change community colleges and technical colleges?

The found community colleges led overall undergraduate enrollment growth in the fall of 2023 by 2.6 percent, or 118,000 students, compared to the previous year.

Community college gains were carried by those with a vocational program focus — pointing to students’ growing disdain for working towards a four-year degree.

“We have shortages in a lot of jobs that require bachelor’s degrees,” said Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the , including well-paying careers in nursing, teaching and software engineering that pay north of $50,000 annually.

“So when we see students entering community college not in those liberal arts programs that lead to bachelor’s degrees, it’s troubling,” Wyner said, adding that a vocational degree won’t provide the long-term financial payoff that would more likely come from a four-year education.

Career-Driven Programs Lead Enrollment Growth

Community colleges with a vocational program focus grew 16 percent in the fall of 2023 compared to the previous year’s 3 percent gain — bringing them above their pre-pandemic enrollment by nearly 30,000 students.

But, transfer-focused community colleges only grew slightly by 0.2 percent in the fall of 2023 compared to the previous year’s 1.1 percent drop — continuing their pre-pandemic enrollment decline by more than 500,000 students.

“There’s fewer community college students entering a transfer pipeline that we can’t afford to lose,” said John Fink, a senior research associate at the .

This trend comes as community colleges remain in a “very deep hole” because their uptick in enrollment doesn’t come close to pre-pandemic numbers, he added.

The report found community college growth in the fall of 2023 brings current enrollment to about 4.5 million students.

Popular programs include computer science, business and health that grew by 9.1, 3.5 and 2.4 percent respectively. 

But, there were more than 5.2 million students enrolled pre-pandemic — leaving community colleges with a net loss of nearly 700,000 students.

“Community college growth is certainly an encouraging sign, but there’s still a long way to go to get back to where we were,” said Jeremy Cohen, a research associate at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Despite the growing number of companies no longer requiring job applicants to have a four-year degree, their hiring behavior hasn’t changed, Wyner said.

“The majority of good jobs in our country are populated by workers that have a bachelor’s or greater,” Wyner said. “So if students aren’t enrolling in community college programs that align with attaining a bachelor’s, we’re going to really struggle filling job vacancies in the future.”

Wyner said the main factor community college-goers rely on to decide whether a four-year degree is worth pursuing is “word-of-mouth” experiences from current students.

“If a student leaves [a four-year] college without a degree or with a degree that didn’t give them a better life than they would have had if they never attended, they’re going to go back to their communities and when people ask if it was worth it their answer is going to be no,” Wyner said. 

“So the decisions we’re seeing them make may be entirely rational because the educational system keeps failing far too many of them,” he added.

Transfer Student Declines Impact Four-Year Schools

This trend has implications for four-year institutions that rely on transfer students as part of their enrollment strategy, Fink said. 

“It might seem like this is a community college issue, but that’s going to translate in years forward to many four-year institutions,” Fink said.

Wyner added how leaders at four-year institutions need to play their part in correcting community college enrollment declines.

“Instead of lamenting the fact that student enrollment in community colleges has come down, four-year schools need to lean in and do something about it,” Wyner said, such as emulating Northern Virginia Community College’s that provides dual enrollment and guaranteed admission at George Mason University.

He said their program transfers more than 4,000 students every year to George Mason University and has a graduation rate of over 70 percent — higher than the national undergraduate average of .

“If you create really strong pathways for students, they’ll come back to community colleges,” Wyner said.

This article is part of a series in partnership with reporter Joshua Bay’s highlighting the struggles of community college students.

Chris Riback: Joan, thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Oh, it’s great to be here.

Chris Riback: You have been in this field throughout your professional career. Give me an overview. Where are we today? What are the significant changes that you’re seeing?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: I’ve been lucky, Chris, that I’ve been able to see the field from multiple perspectives, from the policy side, from the public, private sector side, from the university side. What’s been exciting for me is that everyone is trying to make a difference for young children and their voices together, I think collectively, are starting to cut through.

Chris Riback: What are the top issues today around early learning and children and our society?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: That’s a very big question. I think that the most important people in children’s lives are the adults in their lives, the caregivers, their parents, and those who care for them every day. Both of those groups are not being supported the way a country like ours should be doing it. We’ve got a long way to go to make sure that the living conditions of families are promoting responsive parenting, supporting responsive parenting. We’ve got a long way to go before we can be sure that those people that are caring for children every day have working conditions and recognition that will allow them to thrive so children can thrive.

Chris Riback: What is the Rapid survey?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Rapid is a rapid cycle research effort. It’s a survey that we’ve been doing since April of 2020, since the very early days of the pandemic. In the beginning of the pandemic, we were surveying about a thousand parents of young children a week. We then moved to every other week, and now we’re doing it monthly more and more to really hear from them what are the issues that they’re facing, not assume we know, but listen to their voices, have the data that really reflects what parents are saying in real time.

Chris Riback: Do you derive conclusions each month off of that data or you provide the data and then people who want to access the data to find their own conclusions can do that?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Well, it’s a little bit of both. I think that we analyze the data. For example, we’ve done a lot of looking at what parents are saying about material hardship and that they certainly felt during the pandemic things got a little better when we had policies that supported them. Now those policies have lapsed, and so I think families are feeling that. We also wanted to see how they felt that was affecting that material hardship was affecting their family wellbeing and their children. What was the relationship among those? Because we know that economic supports for families matter to child development in the field. We often talk about early learning environments, but the early learning environment for a child is the whole community. It’s the

Chris Riback: Whole community, it’s the whole world. It’s everything that they touch. Speaking of communities and moving towards solutions and what you see out there, are there some innovative solutions or communities that you’re seeing with innovative solutions out there?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: I’m seeing them all over the country, and unfortunately the news at the national level and in the international level is very difficult. We are talking about poly crisis, covid, conflict, climate change, environmental issues. But at the local level, what I see is people trying to come together, set a north star. We want all our children to thrive along that developmental continuum, and we want to bring everybody together with the objective of reaching that north star. It sometimes reminds me of the early days in the country when everyone got together to help raise the barn. That’s the analogy that I sometimes use.

Chris Riback: Yes. What a great image.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: It is an image that, and you see it in small villages all over the world.

Chris Riback: From raising the barn to raising our children.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Raising our children in a collective way.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: That doesn’t mean that we’re taking them away from their families. It’s the opposite. We’re trying to support their families so they can provide better care.

Chris Riback: One last area where I think where it seems that families are needing support is around the climate crisis. What can we be doing? Are there individual actions or collective actions we can be doing around climate and early learning?

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Well, it’s interesting that you asked that because we recently included some questions on the Rapid survey about what families were feeling about climate and their overall environment around their homes and in their communities. Over 70% of those parents said they were concerned.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: It’s children all over the world and it’s children of the future who are going to inherit the earth. So I think it’s the issue of the moment. It’s one of the issues of the moment, and that we all have to take some responsibility for changing it. I’ve had people say to me, because I’m doing a lot of work in this area, “You’re doing climate now, Joan?” We have so many issues in the field, but to me and to many of us, it’s a child rights issue.

I think we have to take lessons from the youth of the world who are standing up and saying, “Wait a minute, this is my earth that you’re talking about. This is my future and we’re not going to stand for the way we’ve treated it in the past.” Something is changing. Of course, for many children, this has been an issue for years. I remember my first classroom in Boston where this is in the early 70s, where I saw children coming at three and four already showing signs of asthma because their environmental conditions were not supportive of their health. This for many people is not a new issue. Climate’s made it worse.

Chris Riback: Joan, thank you for the work you’re doing today on that. Thank you for your historical work and for coming by the studio today.

Dr. Joan Lombardi: Thank you, Chris, for having me and for being here. Thanks a lot.