The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data

George Bulman () and Robert Fairlie

No 15196, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Although enrollment at California's four-year public universities mostly remained unchanged by the pandemic, the effects were substantial for students at California Community Colleges, the largest higher education system in the country. This paper provides a detailed analysis of how the pandemic impacted the enrollment patterns, fields of study, and academic outcomes of these students through the first four semesters after it started. Consistent with national trends, enrollment dropped precipitously during the pandemic – the total number of enrolled students fell by 11 percent from fall 2019 to fall 2020 and by another 7 percent from fall 2020 to fall 2021. The California Community College system lost nearly 300,000 students over this period. Our analysis reveals that enrollment reductions were largest among African- American 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 protected 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 transferred to four-year institutions. In terms of course performance, changes in completion rates, withdrawal rates, and grades primarily 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.

Keywords: pandemic; COVID-19; coronavirus; community college; enrollment; grades; completion; students of color (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15196.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data (2022)
Working Paper: The Impact of Covid-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data (2022)
Working Paper: The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data (2022)
Working Paper: The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15196

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().