California’s community colleges: university gateway, economic engine

Chancellor of world’s biggest higher education system sees Trump immigration plan as ‘antithesis’ of American values

Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges System, the largest higher education system in the world, “came from the same background that a lot of students who access community college come from. I grew up in a working-class family in south Los Angeles, son of an immigrant mother and a father who was a [US] citizen but spoke no English when he came to California.”

Mr Oakley, the first Latino to lead the CCCS, which has more than 2 million students, joined the US military after leaving high school. He then enrolled at a community college and, like many students at those institutions, subsequently transferred to university to complete a four-year degree – in his case at the University of California, Irvine.

Uniquely in world higher education, the community college system offers students the chance to enter higher education later in life and transfer their credits to complete their courses at a university, thus adding capacity for universities and widening access for disadvantaged students. And California’s community college system is perhaps the most advanced in the US.

Now the state’s community colleges are trying to protect tens of thousands of students – those brought to the US as children by undocumented parents whose status is threatened by Donald Trump’s immigration policies, which Mr Oakley strongly criticises – while also enduring a bout of “angst” as they wrestle with the rise of online education and how to equip students for a world of work potentially transformed by artificial intelligence.

The CCCS is one element of the internationally admired California Master Plan for Higher Education, which coordinates the different roles performed by each of the state’s three public higher education systems. The research institutions of the University of California form one tier, alongside the mass-recruiting California State University system and the CCCS.

California’s community colleges have three primary functions. The first is to serve as a “gateway to higher education for the majority of Californians”, which “allows them, if they want to, to transfer to a four-year university”, said Mr Oakley. Community colleges thus extend the capacity of the state’s public universities. About 40 per cent of those achieving bachelor’s degrees at CSU are transfer students from Californian community colleges, and some 30 per cent at the University of California are such, Mr Oakley added.

The second function of community colleges is to “prepare students for the workforce, not too unlike the apprenticeship programmes in Europe”, he continued. These courses offer certificates in particular industry sectors – healthcare, for example – but they bear credits that students can use to continue their education at a later stage, even if they enter the workforce.

The third function is “non-credit education” (which cannot be used for further study) aimed at meeting specific workforce needs. Mr Oakley cited a Long Beach City College course training truck drivers to work at the Port of Long Beach.

This combination of functions “sets us apart from higher education systems [not only] in the nation but really in the world”, said Mr Oakley. “[In] a lot of places, those functions are done by different entities,” he added.

Mr Oakley took over as CCCS chancellor in December 2016. He previously served as superintendent-president of the Long Beach Community College District near Los Angeles, one of 72 districts that run the 114 colleges making up the CCCS.

The key contribution that community colleges make to the state’s economy, he said, is that “we touch the majority of the workforce of California. And we are closest to the industries that are creating jobs.” Community colleges can “change curricula much faster” to accommodate workforce needs “than, say, the University of California, which operates more traditionally”, Mr Oakley argued. That is important when advanced manufacturing, for example, is largely “computer-assisted” and requires a different skill set from that formerly required by manufacturing, he added.