For over a third of American undergraduate students, pursuit of a college education begins at community college.
These students are more likely than other undergraduates to come from lower-income families, to be people of color, and to work or raise children while in school. Many are the first in their families to attend college. They have enrolled because the practical and economic realities of their lives have shown them that they need a higher education to get ahead, to fulfill their potential and ambitions. And a community college is often the best available option.
Excellent community colleges propel students of all backgrounds into the middle class. Some community college alumni transfer to a four-year university and go on to become teachers and engineers, doctors, lawyers and business leaders. Others go straight from community college to work, becoming the nurses, advanced manufacturing technicians and engine mechanics who make our communities run.
These community colleges offer students an affordable path, enabling their graduates to emerge without the student debt that has ballooned in our country – to more than $1.5 trillion. It’s time that we celebrate the enormous value provided by high-quality community colleges, just as loudly as we laud “elite” colleges and universities.
We should know. As an executive of a major American corporation and a president of a university whose student body is half community college graduates, we see what employers are looking for in recent graduates. As members of the jury that recently selected the winners of the $1-million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence — Florida’s Miami Dade College and Indian River State College — we have seen what great community colleges can look like, especially for nontraditional students.
How do these colleges provide value to students?
First, their students complete college or transfer to four-year schools at rates that far surpass the national average. This matters. Americans with a college degree earn, on average, nearly $1 million more over their lifetime than those who achieve no more than a high school diploma. And they are far more likely to be able to repay the student debt that so many presidential candidates are talking about.
