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Policy Brief

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON COMMUNITY

COLLEGE ENROLLMENT AND STUDENT

SUCCESS: EVIDENCE FROM CALIFORNIA

ADMINISTRATIVE DATA

George Bulman

Department of Economics

University of California

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

and

NBER, Cambridge, MA 02138

gbulman@ucsc.edu

Robert Fairlie

(corresponding author)

Department of Economics

University of California

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

and

NBER, Cambridge, MA 02138

rfairlie@ucsc.edu

Abstract
This paper examines how the pandemic impacted the enroll-
ment patterns, ﬁelds of study, and academic outcomes of stu-
dents in the California Community College System, the largest
higher-education system in the country. Enrollment dropped pre-
cipitously during the pandemic—the total number of enrolled
students fell by 11 percent from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 and by an-
other 7 percent from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. The California Com-
munity College system lost nearly 300,000 students over this
period. Our analysis reveals that enrollment reductions were
largest among black and Latinx students, and were larger among
continuing students than ﬁrst-time students. We ﬁnd no evidence
that having a large online presence prior to the pandemic pro-
tected colleges from these negative eﬀects. Enrollment changes
were substantial across a wide range of ﬁelds and were large for
both vocational courses and academic courses that can be trans-
ferred to four-year institutions. In terms of course performance,
changes in completion rates, withdrawal rates, and grades primar-
ily occurred in the spring of 2020. These ﬁndings of the eﬀects of
the pandemic at community colleges have implications for policy,
impending budgetary pressures, and future research.

https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00384

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745

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

I N T RO D U C T I O N
Understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on community colleges is important, as they
enroll nearly half of all students attending public institutions and more than half of
all students of color. Because community colleges, in addition to providing workforce
training, serve as an important gateway to four-year colleges and universities, they can
be seen as a crucial part of the postsecondary educational system in the United States.
In fact, in some states, including California, nearly half of all students attending a four-
year institution previously attended a community college.1 With recent calls for major
expansions in enrollments and provision of four-year transfer courses, one can expect
that community colleges will gain even greater importance.2 Impacts of the pandemic
on community colleges are therefore likely to have important eﬀects on both the supply
of labor in vocational careers and the higher educational system as a whole.

The net impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on community college enrollment is the-
oretically ambiguous, especially in comparison to the impacts on four-year colleges. The
transition to remote instruction, as well as changes in health and work status, could re-
duce enrollment among community college students relative to their four-year college
peers given their more tenuous patterns of attachment and the emphasis on hands-
on technical training in many vocational programs. Additionally, community colleges
serve diﬀerent student populations and open enrollment does not provide an excess
supply of student applicants to maintain enrollment levels. On the other hand, given
the weak labor market during the pandemic, young adults might have been attracted to
open-enrollment and relatively inexpensive community colleges. Nationally, data reveal
a 10 percent decline in public two-year college enrollment from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020
in the beginning of the pandemic (National Student Clearinghouse 2021), and a 12 per-
cent reduction in initial public two-year enrollment for the 2020 high school cohort
relative to the prior cohort (Howell et al. 2021). In contrast, public four-year enrollment
increased slightly in fall 2020 (0.2 percent), while initial enrollments decreased by less
than 3 percent for the 2020 high school cohort. More recently, however, enrollment
at both public two-year colleges and four-year colleges dropped by 3 percent from Fall
2020 to Fall 2021.

The eﬀects of the pandemic on academic outcomes such as course loads, pass
rates, and grades among community college students is also theoretically ambiguous.
Students might have struggled with online learning given the lack of structure, re-
quirement of more self-discipline, and technological disruptions. On the other hand,
instructors might have been more lenient in grading, students were less distracted by
social events, job opportunities were limited, COVID-19 relief aid was available, and
options for taking courses pass/no pass increased. Thus, GPAs and other outcomes
might have improved instead of worsened in the pandemic. The empirical evidence is
mixed. Students at Arizona State University studied less and were more likely to with-
draw from classes and delay graduation in the spring of 2020 (Aucejo et al. 2020). In
contrast, although students reported challenges with online learning at Queens College

1. See U.S. Department of Education (2010); CCCCO (2009); Sengupta and Jepsen (2006).
2.

In California, the number of transfer-eligible students at community colleges was projected to increase by 50
to 70 percent over a six-year period (Johnson and Mejia 2020).

746

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George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

in New York City, GPAs were higher and there was no eﬀect on credits earned during
the spring semester (Rodríguez-Planas 2020, 2021).3

In this paper, we use administrative college-level panel data covering the universe
of students and courses from the California Community College System to analyze the
impact of COVID-19 on community college enrollment and academic outcomes. The
California Community College system has 116 colleges and enrolls roughly two million
students per year, which represents 20 percent of all community college students in the
United States and 30 percent of all Californians ages 18–24 years (CCCCO 2020). We
are careful to include a consistent set of colleges throughout the time period analyzed
to remove the possibility that colleges not reporting data contribute to an overstate-
ment of enrollment losses. Consistent with national patterns, we ﬁnd that community
college enrollment dropped precipitously in the ﬁrst four semesters of the pandemic
in contrast with mostly stable enrollment in the California State University (CSU) and
University of California (UC) systems. The total number of enrolled students fell year-
over-year by more than 50,000 students, or 4 percent, in Spring 2020 and by more
than 180,000 students or 11 percent in Fall 2020.4 Enrollment dropped even further in
the next two semesters of the pandemic, with year-over-year (YOY) drops of 10 percent
in Spring 2021 and 7 percent in Fall 2021. From Fall 2019, just prior to the start of the
pandemic, to Fall 2021, California community colleges lost a total of nearly 300,000,
or 17 percent, of students. All racial and ethnic groups experienced reduced enrollment
in the pandemic, but black and Latinx students experienced the largest drops. Contin-
uing students constituted the bulk of the net change in enrollment and experienced
much larger enrollment drops from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021 relative to ﬁrst-time students
in percentage terms. Negative enrollment eﬀects were observed in every community
college in the system and, interestingly, colleges with large online presences prior to
the pandemic were not less likely to lose students as courses moved online.

The administrative data also contain information on courses taken and academic
outcomes among enrolled students. Reductions in enrollment were large for both vo-
cational courses and academic courses that are eligible to transfer to four-year institu-
tions. Fields with the largest reductions from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021 include Education,
Interdisciplinary Studies, and Mathematics. Conditional on enrollment, student course
loads were similar before and during the pandemic. However, there were signiﬁcant
changes in course completion rates and grade distributions, especially during the ﬁrst
semester of the pandemic (Spring 2020). From Spring 2019 to Spring 2020, course
completion fell from 73 to 71 percent. The underlying cause was that a much higher
percentage of students withdrew or dropped their courses, while course fail rates de-
creased substantially. The percentage of course grades of A increased from 40 percent
in Spring 2019 to 50 percent in Spring 2020, whereas the percentage of courses with

3. Ahn, Lee, and Winters (2020) ﬁnd that high school graduation rates increased, perhaps due to limited labor

market opportunities during the early stages of the pandemic.

4. These reductions are smaller than those initially reported in the media and by policy organizations (e.g., Burke
and Willis 2021). Preliminary enrollment data for the fall of 2020 did not include reporting for all campuses,
causing analyses based on aggregate counts to overstate the enrollment change. Additionally, preliminary en-
rollment counts did not capture a small subset of students who took only asynchronous independent study
courses.

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747

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

B and C grades decreased. The grade distribution remained elevated and only partially
returned to pre-pandemic patterns in the next three semesters.

Our analysis builds on early ﬁndings of the eﬀects of the pandemic on college en-
rollment and student success. The California Community College system provides an
ideal setting to study these questions because of its size and diversity. The ﬁndings
also contribute to the broader literature on the eﬀectiveness of online education, which
generally ﬁnds worse outcomes for online relative to in-person instruction prior to the
pandemic, and negative eﬀects of online instruction during the pandemic.5 Revealed
preferences of students in community colleges, which oﬀer substantial ﬂexibility in
course taking and enrollment, suggest that students may view online classes as infe-
rior to in-person classes. The ﬁndings can also be interpreted in the context of a broad
literature that documents increased enrollment during economic downturns (e.g., Betts
and McFarland 1995; Barr and Turner 2013; Long 2015), shedding light on the unique
characteristics of the pandemic and changes in instructional formats.

R E C E N T T R E N D S I N C O M M U N I T Y C O L L E G E E N RO L L M E N T
We ﬁrst examine the impact of COVID-19 on how many students enrolled in the Cali-
fornia Community College system. To ﬁrst think about the timing of potential impacts,
on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. A
few days later, on 16 March, the San Francisco Bay Area imposed shelter-in-place or
social-distancing restrictions, and on 19 March California imposed statewide restric-
tions. New York State followed the next day, and by early April most states imposed
social distancing restrictions that shifted in-person instruction to online. The timeline
suggests that health concerns and shelter-in-place restrictions would have had their ﬁrst
potential eﬀects during the spring semester of 2020 and full impacts starting in the fall
of 2020.

Data
The data on enrollment and course outcomes used in this study were down-
loaded through extracts from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Oﬃce
(CCCCO) DataMart system and compiled into a college-level panel dataset. Currently,
three community colleges have not released their enrollment data for Fall 2021, so these
colleges are excluded in prior years to maintain a balanced panel before and after the
pandemic.6 It should be noted that California totals across years that are downloaded
from the DataMart system do not make these adjustments, as noted on their Web page.
In fact, the DataMart system speciﬁcally notes: “Statewide results for the most recent
term should not be considered complete until all districts have submitted data.” Three
community colleges operate on the quarter system so we use their fall and spring quar-
ters to align with fall and spring semesters.

5. For examples of evidence prior to the pandemic, see Figlio, Rush, and Lin (2013), Bowen et al. (2014), Xu and
Jaggars (2014), Alpert, Couch, and Harmon (2016), Krieg and Henson (2016), Bettinger et al. (2017), and Cacault
et al. (2021); and Bulman and Fairlie (2016) for a review. In the context of California community colleges, Hart
et al. (2018) ﬁnd that online courses result in lower completion and passing rates. Recent studies of the impact
of online classes during the pandemic include Bird, Castleman, and Lohner (2022) and Kofoed et al. (2021).
6. The community colleges with missing fall 2021 data are San Francisco Centers (enrollment of 20,262 in fall
2019), Copper Mountain (enrollment of 1,852 in fall 2019), and Victor Valley (enrollment of 13,523 in fall 2019).

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George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

Figure 1. California Community College System Student Enrollment by Semester

Enrollment Trends
Figure 1 displays the number of students enrolled in the community college system
each semester over the past decade.7 We show two trend lines to address changes in
available data: (i) all community colleges with data for that semester, and (ii) all com-
munity colleges with data for Fall 2021 (excluding three colleges as noted above).8 The
trend lines show that enrollment in community colleges decreased substantially in the
spring semester of 2020, with enrollment falling by more than 50,000 students, or 3
percent, relative to Spring 2019 as instruction switched from in-person to online during
the semester. Enrollment declined even more sharply in Fall 2020, with a YOY enroll-
ment decrease of 181,000 students, or 11 percent. The larger drop in enrollment in the
fall of 2020 relative to the spring is likely due in part to students fully anticipating that
classes would not be held in person and because some classes that could only be held
in-person were cancelled.

As the pandemic continued, enrollment dropped further. From Spring 2020 to
Spring 2021 enrollment dropped by 158,000 students or 10 percent. And, from Fall
2020 to Fall 2021 enrollment dropped by 106,000, or 7 percent. Combining the YOY
changes in the pandemic, Fall 2021 enrollment is 288,000, or 17 percent, lower than
where it was in Fall 2019 just prior to the start of the pandemic. These losses were larger

7. Student enrollment include all students enrolled for any course and are not limited to full-time students.
8. We also checked an additional trend line after removing colleges with high adult education enrollment to verify
that the pattern is not driven by these institutions. Communications with the CCCCO indicate that there were
underreporting issues with asynchronous independent study courses. Some students who would have, in prior
years, shown up as enrolled with a small number of credits were not being captured as enrolled in Fall 2020.
The ﬁnal version of the data used in this study has corrected current and past enrollment counts to minimize
this issue.

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749

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

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Figure 2. California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) System Fall Undergraduate Student Enrollment

than the U.S. total for public two-year colleges. Estimates for public two-year colleges
indicate that enrollment dropped by 13 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2021 (National
Student Clearinghouse 2022).

Looking at YOY changes by semester back to 1992, the changes in student enroll-
ment during the pandemic were large outliers. The drops in enrollment from Fall 2019
to Fall 2020, Spring 2020 to Spring 2021, and Fall 2020 to Fall 2021 were much larger
than YOY changes over the last two decades. The magnitude of the YOY changes in
Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 are unchanged when we estimate an event-study regres-
sion that adjusts for a time trend and includes semester dummy variables. We focus
the remaining analysis on YOY comparisons for clarity.

In contrast to these patterns, enrollment in the CSU and UC systems mostly did
not change in the pandemic. Figure 2 displays undergraduate enrollment totals for
both systems of higher education. In the CSU system, total undergraduate enrollment
increased by 0.5 percent (2,098 students) from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 and decreased
by 2.3 percent (9,873 students) from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. Total undergraduate en-
rollment in the UC system increased by 0.1 percent (328 students) from Fall 2019 to
Fall 2020 and 1.8 percent (4,080 students) from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. It is likely that
selective admissions with excess demand allowed these four-year institutions to better
maintain enrollment levels during the pandemic.

Patterns by Race and Ethnicity
The California Community College system has a diverse student body, with 50 percent
Latinx, 12 percent Asian, 6 percent black, and 25 percent non-Latinx white students.
Did enrollment fall disproportionately among students of color? Figure 3 displays YOY
changes in student enrollment for major racial and ethnic groups. Black enrollment

750

George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

Figure 3. California Community College System-wide Year-over-Year Enrollment Change by Race and Ethnicity

dropped YOY by 5 percent in Spring 2019, 14 percent in Fall 2020, 12 percent in Spring
2021, and 7 percent in Fall 2021. From Fall 2019 to Fall 2020, enrollment dropped by
20 percent (17,500 students) among black students. Latinx students, who represent
nearly half of all students statewide, experienced YOY drops of 2 percent in Spring
2020, 11 percent in Fall 2020, 12 percent in Spring 2021, and 7 percent in Fall 2021.
Latinx enrollment in the community college system dropped by 18 percent (135,000
students) from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021. Asian students experienced smaller enrollment
drops in the pandemic, but these enrollment losses were still very large. Asian enroll-
ment dropped YOY by 3 percent in Spring 2020, 7 percent in Fall 2020, 8 percent in
Spring 2021, and 10 percent in Fall 2021.9 The total loss in enrollment from Fall 2019 to
Fall 2021 was 16 percent (28,000 students) among Asian students. White, non-Latinx
students also experienced large losses in the pandemic, but there was a downward
trend prior to the pandemic. White enrollment dropped by 16 percent from Fall 2019
to Fall 2021, but it also dropped by 10 percent from Fall 2017 to Fall 2019, prior to the
pandemic.

Although all racial and ethnic groups experienced large decreases in enrollment
during the pandemic, black students experienced the largest eﬀects, followed by Latinx
students. This evidence is consistent with the enrollment patterns of new high school
graduates, which reveal the largest changes for black and Latinx students nationally
(Howell et al. 2021).

In the California Community College system, Filipino student counts are not included in Asian student counts.
Filipino students experienced enrollment YOY drops of 5 percent in Spring 2020, 8 percent in Fall 2020, 10
percent in Spring 2021, and 13 percent in Fall 2021.

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751

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

Table 1. Enrollment Changes by Type of Student

Student Type

Continuing student

First-time student

First-time transfer student

Returning student

Special admit student

Fall 2019

883,678

259,578

116,887

185,251

104,649

Change to
Fall 2020

−97,702
−29,533
−8,261
−20,364
3,710

Percent
Change

−11%
−11%
−7%
−11%
4%

Fall 2020

785,976

230,045

108,626

164,887

108,359

Change to
Fall 2021

−88,547
−1,258
−17,179
−7,129
4,575

Percent
Change

−11%
−1%
−16%
−4%
4%

Enrollment Losses by Type of Student
The California Community College system classiﬁes students into several categories re-
lated to their current or previous enrollment in a community college, another college,
or high school. Students in these groups have varying levels of attachment to education
and therefore may have responded diﬀerently to the pandemic and the switch to fully
online courses. Table 1 reports enrollment totals and changes in enrollment for diﬀerent
classiﬁcations of students, focusing on changes in Fall enrollments. Interestingly, large
enrollment changes were not concentrated among ﬁrst-time students. First-time stu-
dents in the community college system, students returning to college after taking time
oﬀ, and students continuing with their educations all experienced a decrease in enroll-
ment of 11 percent between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020. Apparently, many high school grad-
uates chose not to start college when it became clear that classes would be held remotely,
and students returning to community college after taking time oﬀ might have seen en-
rollment decreases for similar reasons. One would expect these students to have less
attachment to college and thus to be more likely to not enroll or defer enrolling due to
the pandemic and shift to online courses. However, surprisingly, community college
students continuing with their educations experienced a similar magnitude of change.
That is, being connected to a community college and having greater insights into the
impact of moving classes online did not attenuate negative enrollment responses.

A group that might have been less likely to want to disrupt their longer-term educa-
tion plans are students transferring between community colleges in the system or from
a college outside of the system. Further, transferring between campuses could increase
if students moved in response to the pandemic (e.g., if students moved home). We ﬁnd
that the number of transferring students decreased by 7 percent, which was also large
(note that this is a diﬀerent deﬁnition than students intending to transfer to four-year
colleges). In contrast to the patterns for other types of students, special admit students,
primarily high school students taking community college courses, actually increased in
the fall of 2020 by 4 percent. High school students taking courses at community col-
leges might not have had as much ﬂexibility to drop classes given the requirements and
strict timeline for graduating from high school. Also, the trade-oﬀ for these students
was between taking a high school class online or a community college class online.

The patterns diﬀered somewhat for the drop in enrollment from Fall 2020 to Fall
2021. Speciﬁcally, enrollment among ﬁrst-time students and students returning after
time oﬀ decreased by 1 and 4 percent, respectively. In contrast, ﬁrst-time transfer stu-
dents experienced a much larger drop in enrollment rates, at 16 percent, from Fall 2020
to Fall 2021. Continuing students experienced the same enrollment drops from Fall

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George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

Figure 4. California Community College Systemwide Year-over-Year Enrollment Change by Course Type

2020 to Fall 2021 as from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 (11 percent for each year). Thus, in the
pandemic enrollment dropped less for ﬁrst-time students than for continuing students
when measured as the change from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021. Finally, special admit stu-
dents experienced an additional increase in Fall 2021 as many high schools continued
to face diﬃculties with in-person versus remote learning in the pandemic. The larger
reduction in enrollment of continuing students in both the fall of 2020 and 2021 drive
the overall changes, and understanding why this population was disproportionately af-
fected is an important area for future research.

Enrollment Losses by Course Type and Field
Figure 4 displays YOY changes in course enrollments for degree applicable, transfer,
and vocational courses.10 Overall, no course type was spared from large drops in enroll-
ments in the pandemic. Vocational course enrollment fell by 14 percent from Fall 2019
to Fall 2020, and 4 percent from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021.11 That is, enrollment changes in
response to the pandemic could signiﬁcantly alter career investment among students
and the supply of skilled workers in the labor force. This imposes an especially signiﬁ-
cant cost on students who would have pursued high-return degrees and certiﬁcates in

10. Vocational courses earn credit for vocational degrees and certiﬁcates. Transfer courses earn credit that can be

used at four-year colleges such as CSUs and UCs. Courses are not limited to one category.

11. Course taking for basic skills or remedial class that do not count for credit toward degrees and transfers to
other colleges also experienced a large drop from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 (35 percent). But, basic skills course
enrollments were dropping rapidly prior to the pandemic because of recent legislation (i.e., California Assembly
Bill 705 in 2017). In response to the legislation, colleges made changes to student assessment and placement
processes to emphasize faster student completion of transfer-level English and math and expand direct entry
into transfer-level courses (RPGroup 2021).

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The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

ﬁelds such as nursing.12 Perhaps more surprisingly, at the opposite side of the spec-
trum enrollment in academic courses that are transferable to four-year colleges such
as those in the CSU and UC systems also fell substantially (13 percent in Fall 2020
and 9 percent in Fall 2021).13 This suggests that there was no systematic shift of stu-
dents into lower-cost community colleges who would otherwise have attended four-year
institutions.

Were some ﬁelds of study spared enrollment losses in Fall 2020 and others hit es-
pecially hard? In conversations with oﬃcials at various community colleges, we learned
that the primary response to the pandemic was that colleges did not drop sections for
classes but instead switched to teaching them remotely. The main exceptions were that
programs such as nursing and medical ﬁelds were considered essential and were gen-
erally taught in-person even in Spring 2020. Colleges continued to operate a handful of
allied health programs in-person that would train medical professionals to help with the
community response to COVID-19. On the other hand, the small subset of courses that
were impossible to convert to online instruction because of dependence on physical
facilities (e.g., automotive, aviation, cosmetology, culinary arts, dental hygiene, horti-
culture, and welding) were cancelled.14

Table 2 reports enrollment changes by ﬁeld. We focus on YOY changes from Fall
2019 to Fall 2020 and Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. Some ﬁelds experienced large enrollment
losses in the pandemic. Among larger ﬁelds, Education, Engineering and Industrial
Technologies, and Interdisciplinary Studies each lost more than 20 percent of enroll-
ment from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 and Fine and Applied Arts lost 19 percent. On the
other side of the spectrum, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Foreign Language,
and Psychology experienced enrollment losses of 3 percent or less in Fall 2020. Enroll-
ment losses from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021 shifted a little with some new ﬁelds experienc-
ing large losses. Foreign Language, Mathematics, and Social Sciences each experienced
losses of 15 percent or higher. Interestingly, Engineering and Industrial Technologies
reversed course with an increase of 7 percent in enrollment in Fall 2021 after losing 30
percent in Fall 2020.

These results indicate that losses were felt across a wide range of ﬁelds of study,
including academic subjects, and were not limited to vocational programs. But, there
is some evidence that early in the pandemic the largest reductions were in ﬁelds in
which online learning might be inferior (e.g., industrial technologies, teaching aides,
art, and police training). Overall, the results reveal that the pandemic not only reduced
the supply of labor with career technical training, but also the supply of students eligible
to transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

12. The literature generally ﬁnds positive labor market returns to community college degrees and longer-term
certiﬁcates, with the largest positive eﬀects for training in the health care sector (Stevens, Kurlaender, and
Grosz 2019; Liu, Belﬁeld, and Trimble 2015).

13. Partly reﬂecting pre-pandemic decisions and commitments, the number of incoming transfer students to the
CSU and UC systems from California community colleges increased by 8 percent and 4 percent, respectively,
from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020.

14. Schanzenbach and Turner (2022) examine enrollment at community colleges between 2019 and 2020, and
ﬁnd that COVID-19 negatively impacted courses that provide assembly, repair, and maintenance (ARM) skills.
They ﬁnd that community colleges with relative concentrations in ARM ﬁelds experienced larger enrollment
losses.

754

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Table 2. Course Enrollment Losses from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021 by Field of Study

Field of Study

Agriculture and Natural Resources

Biological Sciences

Business and Management

Education

Engineering and Industrial Technologies

Family and Consumer Sciences

Fine and Applied Arts

Foreign Language

Health

Humanities (Letters)

Information Technology

Interdisciplinary Studies

Mathematics

Media and Communications

Physical Sciences

Psychology

Public and Protective Services

Social Sciences

Fall 2019

Share of
Fall 2019

Fall 2020

Change Fall
2019 to Fall
2020

29,340

158,068

213,162

235,900

135,155

164,299

288,652

75,224

128,296

601,017

100,137

156,187

406,154

71,154

171,459

175,950

146,406

527,507

16%

11%

14%

27,590

155,834

205,463

170,320

94,621

151,585

233,206

75,097

116,108

540,826

95,778

120,002

350,377

65,395

168,154

170,450

123,878

503,437

−6%
−1%
−4%
−28%
−30%
−8%
−19%
0%
−9%
−10%
−4%
−23%
−14%
−8%
−2%
−3%
−15%
−5%

Change Fall
2020 to Fall
2021

−2%
−11%
−9%
−2%
7%
−12%
−8%
−16%
−2%
−13%
−8%
−9%
−18%
−7%
−13%
−14%
−8%
−16%

Fall 2021

27,043

139,265

187,952

166,445

100,778

134,084

213,806

63,031

113,904

468,676

88,378

109,491

285,660

61,142

146,880

146,346

113,389

424,031

Notes: Calculated from administrative data from the California Community College system. The total number of course enrollments for credit
in each field of study is reported.

College Losses and Pre-Pandemic Online Share
Were enrollment losses felt by all community colleges or were they concentrated in only
a few colleges? Figure 5 displays the distribution of enrollment losses from Fall 2019
to Fall 2020 across community colleges in the system. We focus on this YOY change
because it is the largest and it shows the general pattern for other YOY changes. Every
college in the system experienced at least some loss in enrollment in Fall 2020. A large
number of colleges experienced losses in the range of 8 to 16 percent, while only a
handful of colleges experienced losses of less than 2 percent or more than 20 percent.
The distribution of losses from Spring 2020 to Spring 2021 and Fall 2020 to Fall 2021
also indicate that losses were not concentrated in only a few colleges but were felt across
the system.

Given the system-wide shift to remote instruction, an interesting question is
whether the relative online presence of community colleges prior to the pandemic
limited enrollment losses. This would be the case if, for example, colleges with more
pre-existing online oﬀerings had an easier time transitioning courses online while
maintaining quality, or if they serve students who are more willing and accustomed
to taking online courses. Many community colleges in the system had strong distance
learning presences before the pandemic. Using data from Fall 2019, we identify the
online percentage of course enrollments for each community college, which reveals an
interquartile range of nearly 10 percentage points, with 13 percent online at the 25th
percentile and 22 percent online at the 75th percentile. Figure 6 displays a scatterplot
of the percent change in student enrollment from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020 by the on-
line share of course enrollments in Fall 2019. We focus on the Fall 2019 to Fall 2020

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755

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

Figure 5. Distribution of Enrollment Losses across Community Colleges from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020

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Figure 6. Change in Course Enrollment from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021 by Pre-Pandemic Online Course Percentage across Colleges

756

George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

Table 3. Distribution of Student Unit Loads in California Community College System

Fall 2019

Fall 2020

Fall 2021

Spring 2019

Spring 2020

Spring 2021

Unit Load

Number

B. 0.1—2.9

82,470

C. 3.0—5.9

431,169

D. 6.0—8.9

278,163

E. 9.0—11.9

228,797

F. 12.0—14.9 316,147
G. 15 +

147,492

29%

19%

15%

21%

10%

55,028

425,507

261,752

210,802

264,856

138,045

31%

19%

16%

20%

10%

62,761

398,852

236,250

183,563

231,434

118,958

32%

19%

15%

19%

10%

95,080

428,449

280,113

225,761

272,116

30%

20%

16%

19%

81,852

388,435

260,728

214,844

261,939

133,970

134,239

29%

19%

16%

20%

10%

65,187

418,655

253,241

194,482

217,811

120,740

33%

20%

15%

17%

10%

Notes: Calculated from administrative data from the California Community College system. The total number of students enrolled at each
semester unit load level is reported. Enrollment is for all colleges except three colleges that did not report enrollment data in Fall 2020. See
text for more details.

change because courses were oﬀered almost exclusively online in the fall of 2020, but
patterns are very similar for the Spring 2020 to Spring 2021 and Fall 2020 to Fall 2021
changes. In the ﬁgure, each point represents a diﬀerent college in the system. There
does not appear to be a strong relationship between student enrollment changes and
pre-pandemic online shares. The point estimate from a linear regression through the
data is small, negative, and not statistically signiﬁcant (which we also ﬁnd for the Spring
2020 to Spring 2021 and Fall 2020 to Fall 2021 enrollment changes). Apparently, having
a larger online presence prior to the pandemic did not protect colleges from enrollment
losses in the pandemic.15

S T U D E N T O U T C O M E S
Course Loads
We turn to examining how enrollment intensity and student success changed during
the pandemic. We ﬁrst focus on patterns of course-taking. The pandemic might have
impacted the number of units taken by students, aﬀecting their longer-term time to
degree or transfer preparedness. One possibility is that students dislike online learn-
ing and might have shifted their total units downward, taking only the most important
courses that they needed and postponing others. Alternatively, with higher unemploy-
ment, students may have pursued more full-time education. Table 3 reports the distribu-
tion of students taking diﬀerent unit loads from Spring 2019 to Fall 2021. On average,
course loads did not change substantially. The percent of students taking 15 or More
units, for example, was 10 percent in Fall 2019, 10 percent in Fall 2020, and 10 percent
in fall 2021. Similarly, the percent of students taking 15 or more units was 9 percent in
Spring 2019 and 10 percent in both Spring 2020 and Spring 2021. Although it may be
the case that students who remained enrolled tended to be those inclined to take higher
course loads, the lack of signiﬁcant changes in the distribution of unit totals provides

15. A regression analysis that includes additional college characteristics (i.e., the share of underrepresented stu-
dents of color, percent of students on ﬁnancial aid, percent of course enrollments in basic skills courses, and the
transfer rate to four-year colleges) does not reveal statistically signiﬁcant predictors of enrollment drops. One
exception is that we ﬁnd that colleges with higher shares of underrepresented students of color experienced
smaller drops in enrollment, but the magnitude is small: An increase of 0.10 in the underrepresented minority
student share is associated with an 0.007 smaller drop in enrollments.

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757

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

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Figure 7. California Community College System Course Completion, Withdraw/Drop, and Fail Rates

some evidence that there was not a major shift toward lower or higher loads during
the pandemic. The losses in the pandemic were not simply due to low-unit enrollment
students.

Course Completion and Grades
Course completion is likely to be a primary outcome aﬀected by the shift to remote
learning. Figure 7 displays course completion rates since Fall 2012. Course comple-
tion is deﬁned as receiving a passing grade in the course relative to failing, dropping,
or withdrawing from the course. There is a strong seasonal component (Fall versus
Spring) to course completion, and thus we focus on YOY changes within the Fall or
Spring semester. Course completion trended upwards and reached a high of 72 per-
cent in Spring 2019. In Spring 2020, course completion dropped to 69 percent. Course
completion did not change in Fall 2020 from the previous year (70 percent).16 This re-
duction in completion rates is consistent with Bird, Castleman, and Lohner (2022),
who ﬁnd negative eﬀects on completion of similar magnitude among community col-
lege students in Virginia.

The major cause of the decrease in course completion rates in Spring 2020 was
that a much higher percentage of students withdrew from courses during the semester.
Figure 7 displays course withdrawal rates and course fail rates, which are the primary

16. There is some evidence that course completion rates declined more at community colleges with higher shares
of underrepresented students of color (data are not available on the full grade distribution by student race and
ethnicity). From linear regressions using college-level data, we ﬁnd that an increase in college underrepresented
share of 10 percentage points is associated with larger course completion rate declines of 0.3 percentage points
in Spring 2020 and 0.4 percentage points in Fall 2020. Both relationships are statistically signiﬁcant.

758

George Bulman and Robert Fairlie

Table 4. Distribution of Course Grades in California Community College System

Spring 2019

Spring 2020

Spring 2021

Fall 2019

Fall 2020

Fall 2021

Courses

Grade A

Grade B

Grade C

1,249,257 41% 1,358,209 50% 1,232,064 47% 1,285,305 39% 1,304,345 46% 1,134,226 44%

733,196 24%

613,056 22%

567,054 22%

759,969 23%

620,197 22%

545,528 21%

453,841 15%

320,405 12%

310,590 12%

481,039 15%

350,636 12%

319,191 12%

Pass (No Letter)

155,387

143,883

109,015

167,775

117,211

105,805

Fail

490,215 16%

300,545 11%

404,133 15%

589,537 18%

459,210 16%

476,810 18%

Notes: Calculated from administrative data from the California Community College system. The total number of courses with each grade is
reported. Enrollment is for all colleges except three colleges that did not report enrollment data in Fall 2020. See text for more details.

reasons for not completing courses. Although course withdrawals increased substan-
tially in Spring 2020, this was oﬀset by a large reduction in course fail rates. In Fall
2020, both withdrawal and fail rates reversed course. However, withdrawal rates re-
mained elevated relative to pre-pandemic levels. Partially oﬀsetting this eﬀect on course
completion, however, fail rates remained lower in Fall 2020 than Fall 2019.

As the pandemic continued into 2021 course completion returned closer to long-
term levels. Course completion rates returned to 72 percent in Spring 2021, and nearly
70 percent in Fall 2021. Withdraw rates and fail rates generally returned to long-term
levels instead of the disruption found in Spring 2020 at the very beginning of the
pandemic.

The decrease in fail rates in courses might be due in part to instructors being more
lenient in grading during the pandemic. Table 4 reports the distribution of grades from
Spring 2019 to Fall 2021. The percentage of courses with A grades increased from 40
percent in Spring 2019 to 50 percent in Spring 2020, whereas the percentage of courses
with B and C grades decreased. The shift in the grade distribution is too large to be fully
explained by the increased withdrawal rate among students who would have otherwise
earned low grades. Thus, there is evidence that instructors were more lenient in award-
ing high grades during this period.17 The percentage of A grades decreased in Spring
2021 to 47 percent but not fully back to pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, in Fall 2020
and Fall 2021 the percentage with A grades remained high but lower than the 50 per-
cent level reached in the disrupted Spring 2020 semester at the very beginning of the
pandemic.

The unanticipated disruption in Spring 2020 resulted in more changes in course
completion, withdrawals, and grades than during Fall 2020. It was well known among
students that Fall 2020 would be held online, and thus adjustments might have already
been made through enrollment decisions and by instructors in their teaching meth-
ods. Those students enrolling in online courses during Fall 2020 likely did so with full
knowledge that courses would be taught remotely. Instructors were also more likely to
be prepared to teach their classes remotely.

17.

In a randomized experiment at West Point during the pandemic, students assigned to online classes performed
less well on their ﬁnal exams (Kofoed et al. 2021). This suggests that grade increases during online semesters
is likely due to faculty lenience rather than increased learning.

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The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

I M P L I C AT I O N S
We use administrative college-level panel data for the California Community College
System to evaluate COVID-19 impacts on students in the system. In contrast to the
CSU and UC systems, we document large enrollment losses during the pandemic that
are consistent with national trends. These losses were widespread across colleges in
the system. We also ﬁnd that there was a substantial drop in course completion among
community college students in the rapid movement to remote instruction in Spring
2020. Colleges with larger online programs prior to the pandemic were not insulated
from these eﬀects. Reduced enrollment is evident in both four-year transferrable and
career-oriented classes.

These ﬁndings, in conjunction with national evidence that enrollments at commu-
nity colleges dropped by 13 percent from Fall 2019 to Fall 2021, have important policy
implications and raise questions about how to reverse these eﬀects. Future studies can
shed additional light on why enrollment at community colleges was so much more sen-
sitive to the pandemic and the shift to online courses than was enrollment at four-year
colleges. In particular, the interplay between labor market opportunities, college costs,
and ﬁelds of study seem especially compelling. For example, our evidence suggests that,
despite the economic downturn and low cost of community college courses relative to
tuition at four-year institutions, students were not systematically drawn to community
colleges. Indeed, enrollment declines at California’s community colleges occurred de-
spite signiﬁcant federal aid for students and institutions through the Higher Education
Emergency Relief Fund in 2020 and 2021.18 This highlights the tenuous nature of en-
rollment patterns for the types of students who attend community colleges, as well as
the potential vulnerability of the institutions themselves. It will be important to examine
whether reductions in enrollment ultimately reduce the fraction of students who earn
associate’s degrees in technical ﬁelds or who transfer to four-year colleges, and whether
short-run reduction in enrollment translate into permanent reductions in educational
attainment that aﬀect future labor market returns.

Community college enrollment might bounce back as courses return to being held
in person and health and work conditions return to normal. There also might be some
pent-up demand for community college as prospective students postponed entering
college or current students took time oﬀ during the pandemic. However, nationally,
such a return to normal was not evident in the fall of 2021, suggesting that additional
policy eﬀorts may be necessary.

To the extent that community college students are especially responsive to the cost
of education, changes in tuition and grants could help to restore enrollments. Empir-
ical studies have found that reducing community college tuition (Denning 2017) or
implementing free community college through “promise” programs (Gurantz 2020)
signiﬁcantly increases enrollment. Thus, a shot in the arm might come from the re-
cent donation to the California college system from the Jay Pritzker Foundation, which
is the largest ever to the system and provides $100 million in scholarships to students over 20 years. The availability of ﬁnancial aid might be especially helpful for black and 18. The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund was funded through the CARES Act and Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations in 2020 and the American Rescue Plan of 2021. For a summary of funds dedicated to California community colleges, see, for example, Cook (2021). 760 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . f / / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 1 7 4 7 4 5 2 0 5 4 7 5 0 e d p _ a _ 0 0 3 8 4 p d f . / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 George Bulman and Robert Fairlie Latinx students for whom we observed higher enrollment losses. Nationally, Democrats in Congress are proposing to make community college tuition free, which could gener- ate a further rebound and boost. Another promising avenue for future enrollments are high school students. Our analysis reveals that enrollment only dropped by 1 percent for this group. As high school students became more familiar with remote instruction, an increasing number might take advantage of enrolling in advanced online courses at community colleges. However, the large and persistent reductions at community colleges may also reﬂect shortcomings in the quality of the programs being oﬀered and student beliefs about their economic returns. While certain programs, such as nursing, have been found to produce signiﬁcant increases in earnings, others exhibit little evidence of such ben- eﬁts. Further, Grosz (2019) documents that the programs oﬀered by community col- leges signiﬁcantly lag changes in demand from employers, while Baker et al. (2018) ﬁnd that many community college students are not well informed about the returns to diﬀerent ﬁelds. Thus, building enrollments back to their prior levels could be aided by improvements in the quality of programs overall and the availability of suﬃcient capacity in high-demand ﬁelds. There is a precedent for initiatives that target such ca- pacity. Between 2011 and 2018, The Department of Labor provided $1.9 billion to com-
munity colleges through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and
Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program. Colleges used the grants to align their
programs with industry needs, expanding programs in areas such as manufacturing,
information technology, construction, and health care.19 Providing potential matricu-
lates with accurate information about earnings returns could further increase demand.
Brock and Diwa (2021) note that the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of com-
munity college enrollments, especially for students of color, and the need for policies
that improve funding and the quality of the programs they oﬀer.

Improving community college quality and expanding oﬀerings poses a particular
challenge when revenue is down. From the college perspective, the revenue losses from
missing nearly a quarter million students in the California community college system
might be severe and have lingering budgetary consequences. Unlike the CSU and UC
systems, California’s community colleges are open enrollment and cannot simply ac-
cept a higher percentage of applicants when demand decreases. They also do not have
the same buﬀer created by the overhead on research grants and donors. Addressing
budgetary shortfalls will be crucial for ensuring future educational opportunities for
low-income students and students of color. Given the unique circumstances of the pan-
demic, federal and state governments might have to step in with short-term gap funding
to ﬁll the void created from lost tuition and other expenditures by students. In January
2022, the U.S. Department of Education announced $198 million in American Rescue
Plan funding targeting continuing enrollment and reenrollment at community colleges
as well as the expansion of programs that supply in-demand ﬁelds (US DOE 2022).

19. Third-party evaluations of TAACCCT revealed generally positive eﬀects for students on program completion,
credentials earned, employment, and earnings (Scott et al. 2020). Similarly, Pathways for Advancing Careers
and Education (PACE) evaluated pathways programs at nine sites across the country using experimental meth-
ods. The programs targeted low-income students and in-demand ﬁelds, and generally had positive impacts on
hours of education, credits earned, credentials completed, and earnings (Gardiner and Juras 2019).

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761

The Impact of COVID-19 on Community Colleges

Similarly, the budget proposed by Governor Newsom in California includes hundreds
of millions of dollars targeted to retaining and reenrolling community college students,
providing additional grant aid, and expanding training for in-demand health care ﬁelds
(Burke and Smith 2022). Future research can assess whether such initiatives were suc-
cessful in rebuilding community college enrollments and the pipeline they provide to
four-year institutions and the labor market.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Mallory Newell, Jake Knapp, and Bradley Olin for helpful conversations about institu-
tional eﬀects within the community college system, and Valerie Lundy-Wagner and John Hetts
for help understanding some of the issues with the data early in the pandemic. We thank Thomas
Brock, Michal Kurlaender, and seminar participants at the University of California, Sacramento
Center, College Board Forum, and UC Davis Wheelhouse: The Center for Community College
Leadership and Research Workshop at UCLA for comments and suggestions.

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