As More Four-Year Colleges Flip Online, Some Students Take A Second Look At Community Colleges

Sara Maria, the daughter of a school custodian in Ludlow, Massachusetts, didn’t receive as much financial as she needed last spring from her dream school, Syracuse University.

“I was actually looking at it since my freshman year of high school,” Maria, 18, said. “I want to go into marketing and business management and communications, and they’re really good in that realm.”

So she began to waver and to take a second look at her local community college — Springfield Tech.

“I didn’t want to be in debt for a long time, because, with marketing, it depends on what business you go into with salary,” she said. “So it’s not steady.”

Then COVID hit, the economy collapsed, and nothing seemed steady. Her family lost income, Syracuse moved its spring classes online and then announced it would welcome some students back this fall.

“I just knew that I didn’t want to be on campus with a ton of different people and I wanted to keep me and my family safe,” she said.

Maria chose Springfield Technical Community College instead. She is not alone in doing this college cost and health calculus. A survey out this month finds four in ten incoming freshmen at four-year colleges are likely — or highly likely — not to attend. These students say this is because, in part, they don’t trust their peers to follow health safety guidelines and their families don’t want to pay full tuition as more colleges, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Notre Dame to Michigan State University and Columbia University, announce most classes will be online.

Community college leaders are hoping this shift in enrollment trends will offset a steep drop in adult learners who are stepping away because they’ve lost their jobs, income or child care.

Researchers, though, say the enrollment math is not so simple, because the situation remains so fluid.

“We’re not actually going to know what the real picture is until students actually show up on day one of classes,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of the book “Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life.”

“A lot of families have been saying over the summer that they can’t afford their first choice school or that they’re concerned about traveling far distances, given quarantines, and so families are thinking, ‘Hey, community college may be a better bet for the first semester — for the first year,’” he said.

The idea is to earn at least some college credits and then transfer them to a four-year school, if it will accept them.

Read the rest of this story at WGBH’s website.