Working in the community college sector, it’s frustrating when the press runs articles declaring how difficult it is to get into college. Yes, the most exclusive colleges and universities are increasingly difficult to access, but they’re hardly a representative sample of “college” in the US. Depending on how they’re counted, about a third of the undergraduates in the US attend community colleges, all of which have open-door admissions policies. But the ease with which people slip into the language of the difficulty of getting into college explains a lot about why community colleges struggle. Elite institutions are a small slice of reality, but they dominate the public discussion.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in complaints about the cost of college and the burdens of student loans. In the popular imagination, the story is simple: Colleges charge too much. Students dutifully borrow to pay it. And then students struggle to pay back loans. But that story gets the big picture wrong. For example, student loan default rates go down as amounts borrowed go up. The highest default rates are among students who borrowed less than $5,000. The largest balances are among students who attended law school or medical school; although the amounts are high, they tend to earn salaries that enable repayment. The real story of student debt isn’t eye-popping tuition—it’s attrition. “College” is not one thing. Failing to distinguish among sectors—lumping them all together as “college”—takes the elites as normative. That leads to some basic misunderstandings.
Price and Cost
To understand the economic pressures on community colleges and their students, it’s helpful to distinguish price from cost. Price refers either to “sticker price” or to what students actually pay. (Those are often not the same thing.) Cost refers to cost of production.
The business model for public higher education has been to price below cost, with public subsidies intended to make up the difference. The goal is to be economically accessible to nearly everyone. In many states, for instance, the initial model for community college operating budgets was defined as one-third state funding, one-third local funding, and one-third tuition funding. Over time, the state and local shares have become much smaller, with the balance split between tuition increases and spending cuts.
Programs for “free community college” tend to work exclusively on the price side. They offer to displace some or all of the tuition that students pay. They don’t address the cost side. Operating budgets—the part of the budget that covers salaries, utilities, and short-term costs—have been hit by enrollment declines since its peak around 2010. When new public aid only comes via students, the only ways for colleges to benefit from that aid are to raise tuition and/or enrollment.
With the number of eighteen-year-olds dropping in much of the country, community colleges have started paying more attention to student retention and completion. While there’s no magic bullet, several expedients have been found to be helpful. The “guided pathways” movement, for instance, assumes that one reason students drop out is that they get lost in the process. By making pathways to degrees clearer, and by focusing on early and aggressive advising, many community colleges have been able to move the needle on completion. For example, some colleges have found that replacing stand-alone remedial courses with either corequisite models (such as the Accelerated Learning Program) or with mandatory tutoring time has shown promising results. Many community colleges have split their remedial math sequence into two tracks—pre-STEM and everyone else—and allowed students in the second track to skip topics they won’t need. The City University of New York has established a successful program (CUNY ASAP | ACE) that requires students to attend full-time and to check in with advisors monthly. In return, students are given free subway passes and all manner of material supports. However, the price has been substantial enough that efforts by other colleges to replicate this program have been few and relatively small.
Asterisks, Sticker Price, and Financial Aid
Inspired by a program developed in Tennessee (by a Republican governor), President Obama championed “free community college” in his second term. President Biden initially spoke highly of it as well, though a concrete proposal was sacrificed during negotiations around the reconciliation process for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Biden later shifted attention to student loan relief as an alternative.
In the absence of federal support, though, variations on free community college have emerged at the state and local levels. “Promise” programs exist at the level of a municipality or public school district and are often funded philanthropically. They offer to cover tuition for students from a given area at a given community college. Additionally, some states have adopted programs for free community college. For example, through its Community College Opportunity Grant, New Jersey applies an income cap below which students receive either free or reduced tuition. Other states have added postgraduation residency requirements, usually mirroring the length of time they were supported in college. Most free community college state programs are “last dollar” programs, meaning that students have to first fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and access whatever federal and state grants they can, with the program filling in the rest.
While the last dollar programs have made it easier for many students to start at, or return to, community college, their various asterisks and paperwork requirements limit their effectiveness. Some programs require full-time enrollment, for example, thereby effectively ruling out working adults. The FAFSA assumes relatively consistent income from year to year; that’s why it bases income on the “prior prior” year of tax returns. But for many families, particularly on the lower end of the income scale, income fluctuates substantially over time. The documentation required for FAFSA completion is extensive, and it presumes that everyone has social security numbers. By contrast, the “free” K–12 system doesn’t require any of those.
Dual Enrollment
Over the last decade or so, “dual” and/or “concurrent” enrollment programs (DE) have become much more common and popular. In these programs, high school students take college courses that count for both high school graduation and college credit. Delivery models vary. In some cases, high school students come to a college campus to take classes with college faculty and other college students. The more common model, though, involves a college hiring high school teachers as college adjuncts, and having them teach high school students on the high school campus on the high school schedule. (That’s the “concurrent” model.)
DE programs are appealing on several levels. For high-achieving students, they represent an alternative to the high-stakes test models of Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses. In lower-income districts, dual enrollment programs are often sold as ways to demonstrate to students that they are, in fact, “college material.” DE courses can save students time and money. They can also help first-generation students think of themselves as “college material.” DE programs can be offered in a much wider variety of fields than AP can: for example, P-TECH programs offer instruction in applied technical/vocational areas for which jobs can be found locally.
For high schools, DE programs can be helpful in competing for enrollment with local private schools. They can also fill in the academic gaps in the latter years of high school, when many students can fulfill their remaining graduation requirements in only a couple of class periods per day. And having the classes on the high school campus, during the regular school day, minimizes the logistical challenges when students are still involved in high school sports and extracurriculars.
For community colleges, DE programs offer a chance to reach students who otherwise might never attend the college, whether because they think community college is beneath them or because they weren’t thinking of college at all. They can be tools for recruitment, and they are sometimes significant sources of enrollment in themselves.
Challenges for DE
DE programs face some consistent challenges. Teacher credentialing is one. Most public high school teachers don’t have master’s degrees, or if they do, they aren’t in the discipline they teach. (They’re often in education.) For colleges that routinely require master’s degrees in the discipline, or something closely related, that can limit the pool of possible instructors. Differences in schedules can also make it difficult for colleges simply to dispatch incumbent faculty to high schools. In these circumstances, the paucity of master’s-qualified teachers in a high school can limit what the high school can offer.
Funding is another challenge. Dual or concurrent enrollment classes are not eligible for federal financial aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965; so, students cannot get Pell Grants to cover the cost. In the absence of federal financial aid, the cost burden has to land elsewhere. School districts prefer not to pay tuition. Relying on families to pay raises issues of unequal access. Colleges often run these classes at a discount, especially when they aren’t paying the instructor. But when students who previously would have taken their general education courses on the college campus as freshmen instead take them in high school, that can create downward enrollment pressures at the college.
At this point, the jury is still out on whether the enrollment losses from this form of outsourcing are outweighed by the enrollment gains from dual enrollment as a recruitment tool. Some states have opted to pick up the tab for DE, seeing it as cheaper than paying for both four years of high school and two subsequent years of community college. In the states that haven’t made that decision, though, cost-shifting can be a persistent source of conflict.
Public Good and Race
The move from strong public financial support for community colleges to a more tuition-driven model has happened concurrently with some larger demographic trends. The racial composition of community college students is much more diverse than that of the country. Part of that is due to economic stratification, but part of it is generational: the population under the age of 25 is much more racially diverse than the country as a whole.
As community colleges have moved progressively farther away from the culturally normative image of white, 18-year-old, full-time college students, they have also come under greater pressure to “do more with less,” to serve employers directly, and to keep costs down.
Ironically, these trends have hit community colleges harder than most other sectors even though their open-admissions policies have allowed them to dodge the issues around affirmative action in college admissions. If a college takes the top 100 percent of its applicants, then the issue of racial preference within admissions is moot. But the larger trend of older white voters being reluctant to support programs or institutions they identify as benefiting people of color has swept up community colleges, despite their universalist roots.
Philanthropy and Community Colleges
Nearly half of the community colleges in the US were established in the 1960s. Most didn’t have significant groups of alumni hitting their peak earning years until the 1990s. One side effect of being relatively late to the game has been that community colleges receive a much smaller share of the philanthropic donations to higher education than their enrollment would suggest. By some accounts, despite enrolling about one-third of the undergraduates in the country, community colleges only receive about two percent of the private philanthropy directed at higher education. And they don’t have the large endowments to generate income that can be used to support operating budgets that are found in many older institutions.
Community college alumni tend to live within an hour or so of campus. But despite what seems like a formidable home-field advantage, community colleges have consistently lagged in alumni cultivation. Investment returns compound over time, so getting started building an endowment is the hardest part. Without significant infusions of money from endowment returns into operating budgets, state austerity hurts community colleges more.
Conclusion
“College” includes community college, but community colleges’ costs and needs are meaningfully different from other sectors of higher education. A clearer understanding of how they work can allow for more thoughtful policy and better options for students.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
