Community Colleges’ Decline Exaggerated, not Inevitable
To Increase Enrollment, Respect Students’ Goals, Identities, Languages, and Schedules
As many less exclusive, less well endowed, less well funded colleges struggle to maintain student enrollment and related revenue, a consultant cottage industry has emerged peddling a double dose of the illness as cure. To reverse declining student enrollment, some consultants claim, public and nonprofit colleges must adopt market principles by cutting courses, programs, and services that generate relatively less revenue and investing in those that generate relatively more revenue per dollar budgeted.
To justify this unpopular proposal, consultants project inevitable future decline, citing a declinist deficit-minded demographics as destiny. Because not enough people had babies two decades ago, they claim, there are simply fewer 18 year olds, meaning less exclusive colleges have no choice but to “rightsize” by cutting supposedly non-essential functions. Notably, the intensity of this line of consultation, and administrators’ willingness to implement it, seems to have increased during the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when college enrollment faltered, even though it has since rebounded. This is an example of the “shock doctrine,” in which unpopular neoliberal policies are implemented undemocratically during periods of crisis (Klein, 2007).
There is a grain of truth in the declinist school of management. This is especially the case in parts of the U.S. such as the Great Lakes region where there is a relative concentration of less exclusive colleges per capita that predate the federal interstate highway system, much less the internet, and where there is relatively little state support for higher education. Less exclusive colleges that are not innovating — through inter-institutional online seat banking and course sharing, hybrid and hiflex and online blended modalities, and other methods (Marcus, 2022) — and are not the beneficiaries of billionaire philanthropy are indeed struggling to attract students. Private brick and mortar colleges unaffiliated with growing evangelical sects in particular are closing. They are no longer isolated by geography and their tuition is far higher than at public institutions. It is true that some of these colleges are closing or shrinking, and the consultants they hired during these downward spirals honed their arguments with these institutions in mind.
The declinist argument, however, need not apply to community colleges, especially those in counties with growing populations, for two main reasons. First, community colleges provide a public service, not a private product. The vast majority of community college budgets come from state and local governments. When Pell grants, other publicly funded scholarships, and federal grants are factored in, almost all of a community college’s operating and capital budgets come from taxpayers. Accordingly, if a community college feels the pinch, the first rational action for it to take should be to engage in vigorous collective advocacy for sufficient public revenue to provide the education services the community expects of it.
Unfortunately, a generation of community college administrators have failed to convince state governments to restore funding they cut during the Great Recession and never reinstated. Coalitions of students, faculty, staff, and community stakeholders must fill this advocacy void. Sometimes, this may entail collaborating with administrators to present public budget makers with a cohesive rationale for increased community college funding. In other cases, these coalitions may build grassroots power apart from administrators, using their own voices, tactics, and stories to demand fair and full funding for community colleges.
The second main reason community colleges should reject the declinist narrative is because it is poorly tailored for community colleges which serve a far broader age range of students than bachelors-masters degree granting institutions. Community colleges offer camps for kids, dual enrollment for high school students, lifelong learning for older adults, and a rich array of continuing and worker education for people in the middle of their lives. Thanks mostly to immigration, the adult population of all regions in the U.S. has increased since 2010 (Ogunwole et al., 2021), even as state and local funding for public higher education has declined.
Continuing and worker education may account for as much as a third of a community college’s full-time equivalent enrollment and a majority of student headcount. Students older than 22 make up a much greater share of a community college’s credit certificate and degree enrollment. And unlike bachelors-masters degree granting institutions, whose prestige in a given department may attract students from afar, community colleges intentionally serve their neighbors and are far less likely to compete with other schools for more mobile, affluent students. For these reasons, the consultants’ declinist argument is particularly mismatched for community colleges.
These consultants, by their own admission, often have little experience with the noncredit programs so central to community college’s missions and budgets. They may base their advice on quantitative audits of programs enrolling as little as two-thirds of a community college’s full-time equivalent students and a minority of student headcount. By misunderstanding the noncredit to credit internal enrollment pathway somewhat unique to community colleges, and excluding the non-degree seeking majority of students from the data set altogether, consultants paint an inaccurate picture unaligned with community colleges’ missions.
Clearly, the “demographic cliff” forecast by the consultants is not determinative of community colleges’ futures. This makes building alternatives all the more essential. Community colleges, while operating within systemic and political constraints, are agentic institutions that may define their own destinies positively, if equity-mindedness (McNair et al., 2020) and growth mindsets are activated broadly.
To maintain or even grow overall enrollment, community colleges need only do what they do best: innovate. There are three prongs to an innovative alternative to declinist management. First, expanding modalities and course schedules that are accessible and attractive to a wide age spectrum of students, especially part-time students, is key. Accompanying innovation in course scheduling must be assuredness — so students and faculty are not bounced from one section of a course to another — through a proven strategy called “guaranteeing the course schedule” (Carroll & Campbell, 2008). Unfortunately, some consultants are recommending that institutions raise the minimum number of students required in a course section to run it — which means less surety. These approaches may even accelerate downward enrollment spirals as students with more options seek stability at larger, better funded institutions, and students with fewer options leave without achieving their goals.
Second, “language friendly” (Le Pichon & Kambel, 2022) and multilingual courses across the curriculum, not just in segregated corners of community colleges, will also go a long way to meet the educational needs of immigrants. This in turn will assist community colleges in averting the so-called demographic cliff. As businesses across the private sector pivot their market, products, and services to meet the growing multilingual English learner immigrant population, it is notable some consultants are not recommending this growth strategy to community colleges, despite CCs being the best positioned institutions in the higher education space to serve these new neighbors. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are leading the way on language justice. Stakeholders at community colleges with student bodies that do not yet have the 25% Hispanic makeup needed to achieve the federal HSI designation and related funding can still implement the practices of “servingness” (Garcia, 2019) that make these colleges and universities successful.
Third, increasing retention through increased student services and increased community connectedness, rather than cutting services and retreating from supposedly non-essential community work, is the final tine of the three-pronged alternative. This means investing monetarily and strategically in diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and antiracism (DEIAA; Pierce, 2021). Specifically, it means hiring staff and faculty who are curriculum and accessibility specialists to proactively improve the accessibility of all courses and modalities. It means designing and building out student services and curricula that are culturally relevant, especially for Black, Indigenous, and first generation college students. It means providing child care on campus. Unfortunately, some administrators hope DEIAA can be one more duty faculty and staff take on in addition to everything else, rather than an expensive core function that requires dedicated staff and a strategic plan for carving out time in everyone’s job descriptions to build more just institutions.
This three-pronged approach is summarized as respecting students’ goals, identities, languages, and schedules. It is an alternative to the consultant-driven, declinist narrative. It is understandable why this narrative resonates with a certain generation of administrators. They came into their institutional power as state and local budgets receded, and so may see austerity as the only future. Their reach for inevitability arguments that foreclose debate on the human impact of the cuts they propose, however, must be challenged vigorously.
While administrators hold considerable institutional power, they are subject to systemic pressures beyond their control. For that reason, they should not be demonized. Neither should their declinist vision of austerity be taken for gospel. Community college students, faculty, staff, and stakeholders can win a more equity-minded future by building grassroots coalitions that pressure public executives and legislators to fully and fairly fund community colleges. We can bolster this more plentiful future by enacting student services and pedagogies that respect students’ goals, identities, languages, and schedules.
None of this is to deny higher education in the U.S. is at a crossroads. Exclusive institutions flail as they attempt to reconcile the incompatible goals of elitism and social justice. Less exclusive private colleges in the post-baby boom internet era grasp for non-geographic niches while struggling to better serve their local communities. The student debt crisis — in part a direct result of the policies of the “neoliberal turn” (Spence, 2015) — is pressing a second consecutive generation into economic trajectories worse than their parents’. Keying in on this turmoil, the White nationalist right — which uses a variation of the demographics as destiny discourse to instill existential anxiety about the loss of White privilege by exploiting working class insecurities in post-industrial nations — has skillfully positioned the academy as a woke straw man. Furthermore, some young people question the value of a four-year degree, weighing the costs against the move-fast-and-break-things techno-economic present they have inherited.
Yet community colleges are well-positioned to thrive in this environment. They are, or should be, inclusive, affordable, diverse, practical, critical, flexible, accessible, relevant, and adaptable. With strong grassroots coalitions winning increased public funding and innovative workers enacting student-centered enrollment practices and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), deficit-minded demographics as destiny management need not apply to community colleges. If we respect students’ goals, identities, languages, and schedules, our equity-minded future is as plentiful as we make it.
This is the first of three planned articles on this topic. This one is theoretical. The next two will be more research-informed.
