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The Hechinger Report
OPINION: Community colleges are helping students more than ever in the pandemic
It’s time to rethink how we measure community college success
By Christine Wolff-Eisenberg & Michelle Dimino
November 23, 2020
Each of Northern Virginia Community College’s six campuses has a food
pantry, which some students rely on for half their weekly meals.
At the Community College of Philadelphia, some 70 percent of students
have a full-time advisor they can meet with virtually. Wraparound
supports at Loyola University Chicago’s Arrupe College include access
to case management services to help with securing child care and
housing, paying taxes and finding doctors.
Across the Los Angeles Community College District’s nine schools,
students in a program known as L.A. College Promise can receive free
laptops to complete their coursework.
None of these initiatives is new — or a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Community colleges have long been innovators and leaders in serving
students holistically. The pandemic accelerated higher education’s
efforts to support students’ basic needs, like food, housing,
technology and general well-being.
But community colleges had already been modeling how to do this work for years.
That’s because community colleges are called on to serve students who
have the least, with populations that tend to be more diverse and come
from groups that have been historically underserved by the education
system and the economy.
With additional relief for higher education likely on the table in the
next Congress — and a community college professor and advocate heading
into the White House in future first lady Jill Biden — ensuring
community colleges receive the resources they need should be a top
priority for policymakers.
According to a survey early in the pandemic, more than 4 in 10
community college students were affected by food insecurity, while 11
percent experienced homelessness. Enrollment declines, both overall and
for first-year students in particular, have also been most severe for
community colleges, likely signaling the disproportionate impact of the
pandemic.
Through it all, community colleges serve those who have fewer
resources, and they do so with less funding. Higher education policy
and funding models are largely based on “traditional” students
attending four-year institutions — a system not designed to fully
measure, understand or support community college success.
We have documented through our respective research the extent to which
federally collected data can fall short in providing insight on
community colleges — along with ways that holistic measures of student
success hold promise.
Traditional student outcome metrics like completion rates and the
amount of time it takes to graduate are critical, but do not always
paint a clear picture of what success means for two-year schools.
While community colleges enroll about 40 percent of all U.S. students,
they received just 27 percent of all funding provided to higher
education through the CARES Act. That’s because the funding was
distributed based on an institution’s full-time equivalent enrollment,
rather than its total student head count.
A large share of community college students take classes part time,
which meant their schools had less money to distribute per student,
even though their students needed the aid most.
Even before the pandemic, funding for community colleges amounted to
just 61 cents for every dollar received by master’s degree
institutions, and 37 cents for every dollar given to doctoral
universities — figures that have barely shifted over the past decade.
That’s why it’s past time to rethink how we value community colleges
and how we measure their success. It’s time to make sure they get the
resources they need.
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