t has been a dark season for higher education. Declining birth rates after the 2008 financial crisis have led to a so-called “demographic cliff,” a dearth of 18-year-olds to fill the spots at the nation’s universities. Rising tuition costs and accelerating technological change spurred by AI adoption have fueled public skepticism about the value of a degree. And a president and Congress who have the sector in their crosshairs have made surprising sweeping shifts in federal research funding, international student visas, and student loan policies, causing uncertainty and confusion about the future.

But one silver lining among all these clouds has been community colleges. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data show that enrollment is up by 3 percent at those institutions this year. These colleges are creating new programs and credentials tied directly to local industry needs, offering affordable pathways to higher education, and innovating new supports for their students.

“There’s a lot of doom and gloom about higher education right now,” said Penn GSE Associate Professor Rachel Baker, who studies student access to and success in community college. “Higher education is not a monolith, and different sectors are hit differently in different economic times. I think many community colleges right now are okay.”

Built for the Workforce

“We have intentionally developed and strengthened partnerships with employers and industry leaders,” said Peter Jordan, GRD’08, president of Dutchess Community College in New York. “We are working with them to help us develop and strengthen our curriculum so that we are building into our student learning outcomes the skill sets that those employers need. We’ve done it with aviation. We’ve done it with advanced manufacturing and mechatronics. We’re doing it with automotive now.”

For Dione Somerville, GRD’06, president of Owens Community College in Ohio, the relationship with employers is equally direct.

“We are absolutely intertwined with our community,” she said. “What’s happening in our community can’t be separated from what’s happening in our institution.” When new industries arrive or existing ones change, she said, “we have to be prepared to help educate folks for those jobs.”

— Mark McCormick, GRD’17

Another partnership—this time involving municipalities and a regional government council—led to a new certificate in water treatment professions.

“The first cohort was full literally within a week or less,” Somerville said. “Graduates passed their licensing exams and were able to get jobs right away.”

“We’re uniquely situated among higher ed institutions to be nimble partners, to not have to take forever to develop and approve a new degree program or to work with industry on experiential learning,” said Mark McCormick, GRD’17, president of New Jersey’s Middlesex College.

He described a regional partnership with Johnson & Johnson to train workers in aseptic manufacturing. “When you finish all three courses, you get a very high-paying entry-level job,” he said. “You don’t have an associate degree yet, but [your credential] ladders into one, and the industry will then pay for you to continue on to get one.”

For Randi Cosentino, C’95, GRD’11,* inaugural president of the U.S. Naval Community College, such modular options for credentials have been baked into her school, a fully virtual college serving enlisted service members, since its inception in 2020.

“We’re teaching what I call the Naval Core,” said Cosentino. “There are two embedded certificates—a Naval Studies Certificate and a Professional Certificate—which are both stackable, as a part of our associate degree program, and standalone. . . . We believe very much in no dead-end pathways, so everything we do is stackable. Our certificates can become associate degrees, and every one of our associate degrees has at least one guaranteed, high-quality four-year pathway that is seamless.”

Nimble By Design

“There’s a lot of entrepreneurialism within community colleges,” said Cosentino. “That’s inherently due to their mission from the outset.”

She argues that community colleges move faster precisely because they are accountable to workforce outcomes—even at, or perhaps especially at, her school, which is less “in partnership” with employers than it is embedded within one (the U.S. Navy).

“They know they have to be responsive, because they’re economic engines for their local and regional economies,” she said. “There’s a lot less bureaucracy in them.”

Somerville said Owens was able to scale up an AI certificate series developed in partnership with a regional organization in mere months. Alternately, curriculum changes at a four-year school can take years.

At Middlesex, McCormick explained that AI isn’t being siloed into a single program. “Rather than have an AI curriculum unto itself, we see AI as a tool in every employee’s toolkit,” he said. “We’re teaching students how to use it ethically and appropriately across fields.”

That approach aligns with what Baker sees across the sector: community colleges embedding workforce-relevant skills—including AI, data literacy, and professional competencies—directly into programs. “They’re bringing in people who are actually working in those industries,” she said. “That connection is critical.”

“For degree programs that we’ve had for years, we’re now developing micro-credentials so that they stack efficiently into degrees,” said Jordan. “Students can acquire a skill and go to work, but they’re not locked out of further education.”

Welcoming Students of All Ages and Backgrounds

“When you look at community colleges and who we serve, we literally serve everybody,” said Somerville. Although the average age at Owens is 24, she noted that the statistic is misleading. “We do have a lot of dual-enrollment students, and we also have 60- and 70-year-olds.”

This means these schools are, in some ways, shielded from wider demographic trends.

“If the demographic cliff is about fewer 18-year-olds,” Baker said, “18-year-olds aren’t the only people who go to community college.”

Cosentino’s students at the U.S. Naval Community College, for example, are exclusively adults. “We are specifically targeted at enlisted service members,” she said. “Men and women, active duty, globally deployed service members who might even be at sea.”

“Largely, our students are first generation,” said McCormick. “They’re folks who come from underserved communities, who need that extra support to even think about going to college, let alone getting through college.”

These students bring experience, but also complexity.

“A lot of even traditional-age students have nontraditional student lives,” Somerville said. “They’re caregivers, they’re working, trying to piece together one, two, or three jobs to make ends meet.”

That reality has forced community colleges to rethink how they support student success.

Wraparound Support

“It’s never one thing,” she said. “It’s usuallya combination of financial concerns and life complications, layered on top of complex systems that are really hard to navigate.”

Those systems, Baker argues, are often the silent barrier.

“Colleges are incredibly complex environments,” she said. “Federal regulations, state regulations, institutional policies—students are trying to navigate all of this while working, caregiving, and dealing with stress. That complexity can be the final straw.”

Many schools are responding by reframing student success as an institutional responsibility.

“We started the first food pantry at a community college in Ohio in 2012,” Somerville said. The college has since expanded its offerings to include a career- clothing closet, emergency funding, mental health counseling, and sensory rooms for neurodivergent students.

Middlesex has taken a similar approach. “Fifty-one percent of our students reported at least one instance of food insecurity in the last 30 days,” McCormick said. The college now offers a community-resource hub, emergency grants, Chromebook lending, meal partnerships with local faith organizations, and a mental health center with 24/7 virtual support.

“We realize that if students are hungry or worried about where they’re going to sleep, they can’t be successful as students,” he said. At Dutchess Community College, that realization led to a unique-to-the-sector residence hall that operates all year, housing students who would otherwise have nowhere to go. “That residence hall is populated year-round in large measure by student groups that include LGBTQ students who are estranged from their families and foster care alums who have aged out of the system.”

Childcare is also a critical need. According to the 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, nearly one in five undergraduates is raising children while enrolled, and student-parents disproportionally attend community colleges. At Dutchess, Jordan has not only been raising money to scale up their daycare offerings, but the school has embedded it in the curriculum, too.

“Our childcare program also serves as a lab school for our early childhood teacher education program,” he said. “So at once, we are addressing the literacy rate within our community, we are producing teachers to go into early childhood education classrooms that need them desperately, and we’re promoting workforce and economic development, because those parents can go to work being assured that their kids are getting quality, safe, and affordable childcare.”

A Value Proposition

“We have high schools offering between 26 and 30 credits of our coursework,” said Jordan.

That creates an opportunity for accelerated pathways, he said. Students can conceivably complete an associate degree in one year at Dutchess, transfer directly into SUNY New Paltz’s undergraduate business program, and then roll seamlessly into an accelerated M.B.A.

“These students could complete undergrad and an M.B.A. in four years,” Jordan said, “for less than the cost of one year at a private university for their undergraduate degree.”

In New Jersey, McCormick has built formal dual admissions agreements with Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Students rejected as first-year applicants to the public university can enroll at Middlesex, earn an associate degree with a minimum GPA, and transfer with guaranteed junior-year admission.

“We had 278 students start that program,” he said. “Every single year, the students who transfer to New Jersey’s public and private four-year institutions of higher education do better than the native students on grade point average and time to degree.”

Such partnerships between community colleges and universities are crucial, said Baker, who has conducted research on how to improve transfer rates for community college students, because the more complex the regulations, the fewer people transfer.

“We should be working to make processes simpler for students, not just helping students navigate these complex systems,” she said.

— Peter Jordan, GRD’08

Costs Still Dominate the Conversation

In Maine, for instance, possible new legislation aims to codify free community college into the state’s budget, but also would limit eligibility, cover only three years of study, and remove coverage of school fees.

“We call ours the Community College Opportunity Grant,” said McCormick of New Jersey’s program. “It’s income limited, all tuition and most fees are covered.” In practice, the system layers multiple funding streams—Pell Grants first, then state aid, then the last dollar grant. “So surprisingly, few students actually need it, but it does help some students close that gap and get all their college paid for.”

“The SUNY Reconnect program is free for adults between the ages of 25 and 55, but only for specific programs, and only after students exhaust Pell and state aid,” said Jordan. “It’s not free for all. There are restrictions.”

“It’s where we should be headed,” said Baker of free community college, “but it’s complicated. The danger is that every additional requirement reduces uptake. The more layers of complexity that we add, the fewer students take it up.”

And even robust free tuition programs leave gaps, if not for the student, then for the institution.

“It helps a student get in,” McCormick said, “but it doesn’t provide New Jersey’s community colleges with funding for the things like facilities management and expanding new programs.” Tuition, he explained, now accounts for nearly two thirds of his college’s operating revenue—far more than was envisioned when community colleges were created. “You can’t support that on the backs of students,” he said, “so we’re constantly struggling to maintain adequate levels of funding for operations.”

More Than a Back-Up

“It’s the age-old stigma that a community college education is somehow ‘less than’ academically,” Jordan said. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”

He pointed to Dutchess Community College alumni who have gone on to medical school, doctoral programs, and leadership roles.

“Community colleges are educating and enrolling a huge percentage of the undergraduate population,” said Cosentino. “They are a major pipeline and feeder.”

All of the leaders we spoke to were optimistic about the sector’s future and the tangible changes their institutions have been able to make in the lives of their students.

It’s not just the students who have had their lives changed by community colleges. McCormick said that they have made an appreciable improvement on his own life. After studying French at private Davidson College and then earning a law degree at New York University, he found he came alive teaching in the paralegal program at a local community college, eventually leaving his law practice to become a full-time instructor.

“I found my passion,” he said. “I think most people who choose to work in higher ed—public, private, two-year, four-year—generally share that passion, but I think it’s most pronounced, from what I can see, at the community college level. I think it’s because most of us, even those who aren’t in the classroom, directly interact a lot with our students, and we see the huge impact that getting a degree has for the students we serve.”

“People deserve an opportunity to live to their full potential,” said Somerville. “For many people, that path runs straight through a community college.”