If college outcome and enrollment trends are to be believed, community colleges are on the verge of showing they can change to “meet the moment.” Leaders from more than thirty community colleges across the country gathered last week at one of the country’s largest, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), to help each other push the envelope. What is the moment? Proving that community colleges can be economic and talent engines of the regions they serve.
The convening, called “Advancing Economic Mobility at Community Colleges,” illustrates how these sometimes unsung partners in higher education are stepping into the spotlight to demonstrate their value. They are managing, in some states, to stem the tide of funding cuts and enrollment drops, and more are announcing new free college programs, after proving their worth to state legislatures by leaning into economic development challenges of their specific regions. Meanwhile, in these interesting political times, it must be said, higher profile universities remain in the hot seat of public scrutiny.
Community college leaders shared, for example, the nuts and bolts of how NOVA has partnered with AWS in a region through which two thirds of the nation’s internet data flows. These partners are creating specific credentials in data operations, Cloud computing, and cybersecurity to provide AWS a talent pipeline and Virginia residents good jobs. (This is part of the partnership that helped Northern Virginia win the national contest for the second Amazon headquarters.) We met one apprentice for whom NOVA and AWS fashioned a no-cost work/school progression, Kordell Williams: “I was loading trucks three years ago. Now I’m the lead technician at my data center and training others.” In Ohio, Lorain County Community College helped lead the charge to support Intel in training 10,000 new semiconductor workers. David Shahoulian, from Intel, explained how the whole community college network of Ohio leaned in to solve the talent gap when they won a big chunk of CHIPS Act funding.
These are some of the community college superstars profiled in a recent book that inspired the convening, which was co-hosted by NOVA, the Project on Workforce, and Education Design Lab. Anne Kress, president of NOVA, wanted the group to come together to codify best practices; to shape a formula for catalyzing a regional talent engine that can support the 60% of Americans not earning a bachelor’s degree, but poised in many locales to access professional careers and family sustaining wages. The conveners designed the day to address some of the “stickiest” issues community colleges face—from building better data systems to funding noncredit programs. Fortunately-positioned colleges, like those featured in the book, hope to help a broader group of institutions lean in, too, even those who might be missing one of the key ingredients: large, hungry employers, receptive state legislatures, and savvy, disciplined college leadership.
The book is “America’s Hidden Economic Engines,” co-edited by Robert Schwartz and Rachel Lipson. Schwartz summed up the common quality of successful community colleges in today’s environment: they have become “dual client” institutions, meaning they focus not only on the student, but also on the ultimate buyer of the college product: the employer.
In regions where there are no mega employers, it’s tougher, to be sure. Former Pima Community College Chancellor Lee Lambert described how the college rallied the car dealers in Tucson, Arizona, who had soured on working with Pima when he arrived, with a pretty basic message: “We can be responsive to your needs.” Among many other programs, Pima heard the message that modern cars have become data centers on wheels and developed Fast Track certificates in Automotive Information Technology.
Anne Kress from NOVA said the moment requires a mindset shift; that colleges need to work to earn the moniker “community” colleges, which was added after the 1947 Truman Report to reshape the mission of junior colleges. She noted that her job is to spend as much time “working the outside as the inside.” That means structuring the college's employer-facing departments with a single point of contact, ideally by industry. She admitted that the inside work can feel like “Game of Thrones,” rearranging faculty to be able to teach the latest employer-demanded skills, like data networking or AI, cybersecurity, or in northern VA, even real estate management. No less daunting is the chess game of converting those “jobs of the future” curricula to degree-reserved course credit, so students can use financial aid.
Being a dual client institution means pointing one compass toward employers, but the other, even more intently, toward the student customer. I pick up, at this and many other convenings, an increasing focus on addressing the challenges that keep students from succeeding. La Guardia Community College president Kenneth Adams reminded the group, “We are in the obstacle-removal business.” Some colleges attending the convening said that almost half of their students face homelessness with today’s high housing costs. (He described a novel voucher partnership with Airbnb for his NYC campus.) The other student-focused shift over time has been a customer-centric look at the enrollment data to query: “What are students asking us for?” Clearly, a growing answer in recent years has been more short-term and job-securing credentials, what Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller called “purpose fit” offerings. And many of the colleges attending told us that roughly half their students are looking for “in-and-out” job preparation programs.
The enrollment statistics don’t lie when they show that the new growth at community colleges is coming from the segment that focuses on vocations, rather than transfer paths to four-year colleges. (No offense meant toward the critical role transfer paths serve.)
But we are starting to get underneath the stats that have given community colleges a bad rap in terms of outcomes. Renee Haltom from the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank shared a new set of metrics they are piloting, which don’t judge community college success rates on federal data, which are geared to treat everyone as if they are a full-time, degree seeking student. Rather, they track the “modern” community college student (my term) who is dipping in and out, looking for a shorter-term credential here or there or transferring to a four-year university before getting a degree. Or taking college classes in high school to save money. By the Bank’s measure, community colleges, at least in the four Mid-Atlantic states they have tracked so far, are engines of mobility.
By a show of hands, at the end of the convening, I asked an admittedly leading question: which leaders are “very” optimistic about the future of community college. I think they all raised their hands (I may have missed a few). Many wanted to add comments. Michael Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio: “We have to be that sector that can ride the wave to tie economic impact to social impact.” Molly Dodge from Ivy Tech, Indiana’s statewide community college, “Employers finally see us as co-producers of talent.” Tracy Green, from Lorain County Community College, ”The headline is not enrollment, the headline is what’s at stake. “
It’s been a rough decade for all colleges, but community colleges took the biggest enrollment hit since the heyday of the early 2010’s, a 37% decrease. If you look beneath the totals by any measure, you’ll see that it’s two types of community college students that justify these leaders’ optimism about a comeback: the vocationally-focused, often short-term credential seekers I mentioned above, and even more so, high school students taking advantage of the increasing number of state programs that allow them to blend the last years of high school into college to save money, or even bypass college altogether with job-ready certifications.
What could rev these “hidden” engines even more? I left with many take-aways around changing the mindset and narrative, working the outside, restructuring administrations, creating short-term Pell grants to help students pay for short-term credentials, but also one that’s perhaps not so obvious.
Several panelists talked about the trend that has snuck up on leaders, the #1 driver of community college enrollment nationally. One out of every five college students is actually, today, still in high school. Paula Dibley from Forsyth Tech in Winston-Salem, and Jessica Lauritsen from the Education Design Lab, who is running a national design cohort on this topic, described: if we could only move dual enrollment programs away from being “random acts” and “programs of privilege,” we could re-engineer the end of high school to solve many issues of access, affordability, and last-mile regional work preparation.
Kathleen deLaski is a senior advisor to the Project on the Workforce and founder, Board Chair of the Education Design Lab. She has a forthcoming book on redesigning college for Harvard Education Press.
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