The fortunes of community colleges in most states are a gauge on the economy of both state and nation.  Clearly, they are helping weave the recovery from the Great Recession, which marked the start of the Obama presidency, and hit it hard.

This is the picture that emerges from the continuing studies that the Education Policy Center of the University of Alabama is making of high education finance and student aid. Among the key findings of the Center’s February 2014 report, “Halfway Out of Recession, But a Long Way to Go,” are these:

• College opportunity is widely threatened by both tuition increases and the changing demands on state budgets. A majority of college students “are enrolled in one of the 19 states with threats of access in one, two, or all three public higher education sectors,” which “served 8.1 million of the nation’s 15.l million full-time equivalent students in 2010-11,” or 54% of all enrolled. . . .  “tuition  is still increasing by 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation in all three sectors . . .”
• Higher education is less a state budget priority than it was before the Great Recession. It no longer ranks among the top budget drivers. “In 2013 legislative sessions, Medicaid and K-12 were the top budget drivers,” followed by pensions.  “Costs related to the Affordable Care Act replaced Higher Education among the top five drivers.”
• “As state support fails to keep up with inflation, students and families will be squeezed . . . Colleges are forced to raise tuition at more than double the inflation rate to meet shortfalls.”
• “All community colleges face predicted financial strain; rural colleges face record levels of strain.”

These trends are largely drawn by and from the EPC’s annual survey of the state directors of community colleges. The 2013 survey, compiling returns received between early June and late August, was answered by all 51 state directors.

The higher demand that the recession has imposed on community colleges is borne out by the data. It appears that the recession intensified two developments that were changing higher education before the recession began. Women had become the still-growing majority of undergraduate enrollment, now claiming three of five new degrees. It was their liberal use of community colleges that gave them this majority, at the same time making community colleges the largest producer of undergraduate credit.

Accentuated by the recession, these trends are propelling change in higher education that is unlikely to be reversed, and more likely to continue. As economic and technological change continue to propel each other at a growing pace, the demand for new job skills is likely to be largely centered in community colleges. They will be increasingly knows as the colleges of lifelong learning. If they are shortchanged in this mission, American competitiveness will suffer.  Success at this mission will make them the wellspring of the new middle class.

Frank Mensel ― July, 2014