Supporting California Community Colleges in Pandemic Recovery: Insights From a Systemwide Survey

• In Event: COVID-19 and Community Colleges: Can Timely Research Accelerate Their Recovery and Support Racially Minoritized Students?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant enrollment declines across California Community Colleges (CCCs). These declines were worse relative to many states, increasing concerns about whether and how students may return to their intended degree paths, especially learners least represented among college enrollees and graduates, including racially minoritized and low-income students. During this challenging time, students faced substantial uncertainties about their health, financial stability, learning environments, and family and social connections – all critical elements for students’ success in college.

The pandemic also stressed the existing support systems that CCCs use for meeting learners’ academic and non-academic needs. CCCs have been able to access substantial resources and funding from federal, state, and philanthropic sources to engage in a series of recovery efforts to address enrollment declines and to support student persistence and degree attainment. However, to date, there has been no formal examination of the specific recovery activities CCCs have implemented and how supplemental pandemic recovery dollars were spent to support these efforts.

Through extensive primary data collection and tabulations of administrative records, this study uses a rich inventory of the recovery efforts made by all 116 CCCs to determine how supplemental federal, state, and other philanthropic dollars were spent in those efforts. All CCCs were invited to participate in a survey administered online via Qualtrics, a web-based software that allows the creation and administration of surveys, as well as the generation of analytical reports. CCC presidents were contacted directly to ask them to participate or delegate institutional representatives to complete the survey. The instrument used for the survey captures quantitative and qualitative information from colleges to gain deeper insights into the specific pandemic recovery activities community colleges have put in place and how recovery activities and investments have contributed to improving student outcomes. The survey also captures information on strategies used to re-engage students and which of them are perceived to be the most effective, learner subgroups targeted, and recovery needs that remain unmet.


Using this data, the study explores differences by key college-level demographic and regional characteristics (e.g., share of Latino students, share of Black students, share of low-income students, rural, urban, college size, etc.) and documents correlations between recovery activities and student outcomes. Administrative data from the CCCs Chancellor's Office, among other sources, is also used to complement those analyses. In the near future, a quasi-experimental analysis of the impact of specific recovery activities including monetary aid and flexibilities in course formats will be conducted using the information collected through the survey. Findings will be useful to state and federal policymakers in understanding more about recovery activities and guiding future funding and policy efforts. In addition, evidence gathered could be leveraged to inform colleges' strategies and resource allocations to effectively re-engage students, sustain enrollment, and attain equitable outcomes across crucial student subgroups.

Author

• Olga Rodriguez, Public Policy Institute of California