Examining Losses and Recoveries in Community College Enrollment: Lessons From the Los Angeles Community College District

By Soumya Mishra, Elise Swanson, and Rachel Tropp

Community colleges play an important role in the higher education ecosystem. In addition to serving as affordable gateways for students to enter four-year universities, they offer career-focused degrees and credentials which can significantly drive up annual earnings. Their many locations, open enrollment policies, and significantly lower tuition costs—in California, less than one sixth the average cost of a public four-year institution—make them accessible to many more students.

But as the world grappled with the fallout from COVID-19, community colleges found themselves at the forefront of a battle against dwindling enrollment. The pandemic didn’t just amplify existing barriers, which may have contributed to the sliding enrollment seen pre-pandemic—it erected new ones, from technological woes to economic uncertainties and public health concerns.

While modest recovery signs indicate that the steep enrollment drop has begun to reverse, enrollment remains well below pre-pandemic levels, translating to diminished educational and economic prospects for a significant segment of the population.

A clear understanding of enrollment losses is critical for driving institutional responses. What, then, is causing the enrollment decline—and will it continue?

Case Study: Los Angeles Community College District

Zooming in on one of the nation’s largest community college districts, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), we see a microcosm of this downward trend. LACCD serves a racially and socioeconomically diverse metropolitan area. There, enrollment plummeted by almost 30% between fall 2017 and summer 2023, from 127,000 to 90,000 students—a loss of 14,000 more students than our estimates predicted if the pandemic had not occurred.

What can we learn from LACCD’s experience?

Losses have been felt unevenly across demographic groups. Initial pandemic-related losses were much higher for Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander students, though by fall 2021 these declines had slowed or reversed for some groups, while they continued for Asian, Indigenous, and White students. The initial drop in enrollment was also greater for male students, a pattern also documented nationally. Institutions need to explore the drivers of these disparities in enrollment losses and craft targeted interventions to equitably recover student enrollment.

Upstream changes are driving enrollment loss. The majority of students in LACCD are continuing students—students who have been enrolled in the district for at least a term. This is also the population among which we observed the largest declines in enrollment. Year over year, we saw declining cohort sizes of continuing students. From 2017 to 2022, this group declined 37%, representing roughly 27,000 students.

There are several ways the number of continuing students can shrink. Students who complete a credential usually exit the student population—if more students are completing credentials than before, this could lead to fewer enrollments in the succeeding semesters. Students can also stop out partway through a program, not earning a credential and not reenrolling in the following semesters (although these students may eventually return). Last, there could be fewer students coming in the door in the first place. We asked: In LACCD, were students exiting more than before, or were they simply entering at lower rates?

Our analysis revealed that neither the one-time increase in stop outs in fall 2020 nor increases in credential attainment explain the magnitude of enrollment declines. It is upstream changes—entry into the college—driving the decline, not downstream changes or exits from the college.

Not all enrollment types contributed equally to this decline. The number of dual enrollments (high school students also earning college credits) and returning students (LACCD stop outs who reenrolled after at least four terms out of college) bounced back quickly, whereas enrollment rates for first-time-in-college students, transfers, and older students who may have some college experience dropped precipitously, decreasing the number of students who would roll over into the continuing student pool a year after entering the LACCD system.

However, as the one-time surge in stop outs in 2020 did not continue into succeeding years and as all student sub-groups continue to rebound, we expect the continuing student pipeline to refill gradually in the coming years.

Finances are likely an important driver of enrollment losses. Though finances and affordability played a large role in student enrollment and persistence even before the pandemic, the initial shock of the pandemic caused a major disruption to enrollment as students lost employment, took on additional caregiving responsibilities, or increased their employment intensity.

We find that unmet financial need may have contributed to enrollment declines. Students’ access to financial aid appeared to determine differences in enrollment losses in LACCD. Among its 100,000 students are many members of high-needs and underserved student populations. Over half of students qualify for the California Promise Grant, a fee waiver to cover tuition with a current value of about $1,000 per year for full-time enrollment. A quarter receive Pell Grants, a federal award with an average value of $4,400 per year that can cover housing, books, transportation, and other basic needs.

Students who never received financial aid had the smallest overall drop in enrollments, likely reflecting their ability to cover costs. Students receiving both California’s Promise Grant and the federal Pell Grant had the steepest initial losses, but the largest and most prolonged decline was among students who received only the California Promise Grant. These drops likely reflect the importance of unmet financial need as a key factor driving enrollment declines. Enrollment trends may also reflect students’ growing concern about the tradeoff of investing time in higher education to increase future earnings rather than increasing their earnings in the present.

While enrollment has rapidly recovered among students under 20—perhaps due to local investments in dual enrollment—and students over 55, enrollments remain depressed among students in peak workforce age groups, which may reflect the opportunity cost of seeking further education in place of working, which we explore elsewhere across Los Angeles County. There is room for optimism, however: If LACCD follows national trends, declines among many working-age cohorts may have begun to reverse in 2023.

Implications

Declining enrollment has a direct bearing on the financial health of community colleges, which receive funding based on their full-time student population, but most critically, it represents foregone educational and economic opportunities for thousands of individual students. While modest signs of recovery provide reason for hope, our analyses troublingly suggest that an uneven recovery may be widening opportunity gaps across groups.

It is critical for researchers and policymakers to identify responses—such as providing greater financial assistance, basic needs supports, and childcare slots and increasing choice in course modalities—that could mitigate barriers students are facing and boost enrollment back to pre-pandemic baselines.

Soumya Mishra is a postdoctoral fellow at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. Elise Swanson is the associate director of research and Rachel Tropp is a communications specialist at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

The Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students (LTES) project team comprises Chris Avery, Jon Fullerton, Maury Pearl, Deborah Harrington, Elise Swanson, Rachel Worsham, Soumya Mishra, Brian Johnson, Victoria Varlack, and Anthony Bald. We are also grateful to Tatiana Melguizo, a founding co-PI of the project who shaped the direction of this work and tragically passed away in 2024. All errors are those of the authors.

The LTES project is fully funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305X220018 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.