Yesterday, Today And Beyond: There May Be A Community College In Your Future

Craig T. Follins, a community college leader, wrote this opinion in 2016 about why community colleges deserve a place in students’ plans, including the Pathways Initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges. The updated section below reports what researchers have found about guided pathways since then, and what students and families should ask a college today.

It is late summer and I am sitting in front of my flat screen anticipating the next event in the summer Olympics in Rio. The studio host begins a discussion about a song that was written some 50 or so years ago about a girl from Ipanema. He talked about this song being among the top ten most played songs of all time. To be sure, I just knew they would tell us what the most played song of all time is. Turns out that the Beatles’ “Yesterday” with over 7 million plays at 380 spins per day on average since it’s 1965 release is thought to be in a dead heat with the Righteous Brothers “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ with about 8 million plays a day on the radio and television (wcbsfm.cbslocal.com)

You may ask just what does all of this have to do with community colleges? My response is, everything. Noting that it was around the mid-1960s when there was a community college being built somewhere in America nearly every month. This was the height of another period of war called Vietnam where returning soldiers were coming home in search of a good transition into the civilian world. Moreover, this was also a time of great unrest in which civil and human rights were part of the daily lexicon in American life. It was 1965 and the Beatles’ “Yesterday” was played loudly across college campuses and is thought in many circles to be a song for a generation of change. Indeed, we all wanted to believe in a yesterday when troubles seemed so far away.

The Rising Cost of Higher Education

Fast forward to 2016 and we appear to be eerily in a familiar place of social and civil unrest and the need to educate a new generation of returning military veterans seeking to transition to a solid, middle-class life. We are also witnessing many traditional aged students (18-22) having to make significant choices about where to begin or continue their post-secondary education. While quality, academic programming, tradition, athletics, location, family history are all important considerations, the overall cost of a quality education has become a critical factor in the selection of an educational or training institution.

Yesterday (that being 1965) the cost of an average home was about $13,000 (www. thepeoplehistory.com), average income was $6,450, gasoline was about 31 cents a gallon and a brand new car was about $2,650. A loaf of bread was 21 cents and rent was about $118.00. Oh, how we long for “Yesterday”. Today, most students cannot afford the cost of a top-tier university or college. According to Bloomberg News, students attending Ivy League schools such as Brown University will pay nearly $50,000 per year to attend. There are scholarships and other financial assistance, but the cost of education is rising.

While the cost of education is rising, so is the amount of debt that students are incurring. The average amount of debt that students leave college with today is north of $30,000. Thus, while we reminisce about “Yesterday” the reality of today is staring families in the face. Enter the community college. Parents, K-12 stakeholders and educational policy experts are taking a hard look at community colleges. Enrolling nearly half of all undergraduate students and long a ticket to a middle- class wage, these colleges are even attracting college graduates returning for a high-wage skill.

Community Colleges Focused on Access and Success

As a society, we are still debating whether students should go with their passion, or enter a career track leading to meaningful employment. This is a conversation that will continue to be a significant aspect of how students transition into a life after education and training. Community colleges have become more introspective in recent years, no longer concerned with just access. They are focused on access and success. There is a greater degree of public demand for accountability and completion. Scarce tax dollars require regular reporting of student outcomes. Therefore, reports related to enrollment, course completion, persistence, retention and completion are cornerstone elements of community college organizations. There may be a community college in your future.

Community colleges are at the forefront of new ways of learning such as the Pathways Initiative by the American Association of Community Colleges. Thirty colleges are part of a cohort focused on providing a very clear sequence of courses along with support services designed to accelerate completion. Pathways are not new, but the focus on the development of a clear path to completion for all students is a significant new development. The research for the student pathways was conducted by The Community College Research Center (CCRC), which is housed at Columbia University in New York. In fact, many community colleges are now utilizing a new book entitled: Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success as a guide to successful student pathway development.

What Community Colleges Offer Students and Families

Having worked in various leadership roles in community colleges across the country (including college president at two), I can tell you first-hand that community colleges are part of the future of many K-12 students and their families. In addition to great academics and convenience, community colleges offer adult education, continuing education, citizenship, community education and extended learning opportunities. Community colleges offer smaller classes at less cost and nurturing environments filled with stakeholders interested in the success of every student that walks through the door in search of a better life. Community college students often talk about that “lovin” feeling they get when they are provided with all of the wrap around services they receive.

Community colleges seek to meet the specific needs of the communities they serve. Many high school students, in fact, return to take classes in community colleges during summer and holiday breaks. This saves on costs and helps accelerate learning. Students are met where they are and moved forward. No other educational entity has the history, resources and organizational structure of a community college. The idea of the community is so unique that it is being developed overseas as well.

A Personal Path Through Community College

As I watched the Olympics and thought about “Yesterday,” I recalled my own experience as a community college student in the 1970s. I returned home from the Army and was not able to get into a four-year college because of my grades. However, New York City Community College was in my future. While I did not earn my degree there, I was able to use the credits I earned and later transferred to a four-year institution (where I later graduated). As a community college leader, I take the time to talk to students and parents about my “Yesterday” and that perhaps, community colleges may be in their own futures.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow we are challenged with a changing society with new demographics, limited resources, high expectations, increased demand for higher skills and a need to close class and wage gaps. There may be a community college that is part of a future that is filled with choices that are often confusing. What is not confusing is knowing that nearly 65 percent of all future jobs/careers will require some form of higher education. Many of these jobs are “middle-skill” jobs requiring more than a high school diploma, but not necessarily a four-year degree. I encourage all students to have a credential beyond high school that affords them an opportunity to be a globally informed, contributing member of this wonderful world. Perhaps a community college is a part of that equation.

Community college pathways to completion: what a decade of research shows

When Craig T. Follins wrote about the Pathways Initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges, the effort was new and 30 colleges were taking part. Several years of research now allow a more measured look at community college pathways to completion. The Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose work Follins mentions above, has published much of the evidence. This section summarizes what its researchers report, what remains unresolved, and what a student or parent can do with it.

What guided pathways are

As Follins describes, the aim is a clear sequence of courses with support services, designed to help students finish. CCRC’s April 2025 post, linked below, describes the model as a whole-college redesign built on four pillars that help students choose and gain momentum in a program of study. It notes that the model was first described in the 2015 book Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, which Follins also mentions.

What the evaluations found

A March 2024 CCRC brief by Davis Jenkins, Hana Lahr and Thomas Brock, Lessons From Two Major Evaluations of Guided Pathways, summarizes two studies: an evaluation of the AACC Pathways Project, covering 30 colleges from around the country, and an evaluation of state initiatives in Ohio, Tennessee and Washington State, covering 70 institutions in total. The findings are encouraging but limited.

• Whole-college reform is feasible, but takes time, at least five years, to carry out.
• At the AACC Pathways colleges that made the most progress, and in Tennessee, scaled implementation of complementary sets of guided pathways practices was positively related to some measures of early student momentum. Where progress was smaller, the relationship was weak or not evident.
• The brief describes associations between implementation and outcomes and does not claim that the reforms caused the gains. The link held for some measures and only at the sites that advanced the furthest.
• Students from all backgrounds may benefit, but the authors say the reforms are not sufficient to close equity gaps between racial and ethnic groups.

The evidence therefore supports a careful conclusion: clearer pathways seem to help students build early momentum when a college puts them in place thoroughly, and nobody should expect an overnight jump in graduation numbers.

The newer questions about value

In an April 2025 post, Strengthening Community College Pathways to Post-Completion Success, Hana Lahr, John Fink, Davis Jenkins, Maggie Fay and Serena Klempin draw on a decade of CCRC research. They note that community colleges lost enrollment during the years CCRC studied early reforms, that COVID-19 caused a further sharp drop, and that enrollment has partly recovered. They say most students who start at a community college do not complete any credential, and that many who do are unable to secure a living-wage job or transfer without excess credits in their major field of interest. The authors argue that colleges now need to strengthen the paths to employment and further education, and they name five next steps: working with employers and four-year institutions so that programs lead to living-wage, career-path jobs, helping students develop communication, problem-solving and quantitative skills, redesigning recruitment and onboarding to help students explore, choose and plan a program of study, enabling busy students to finish in as little time and cost as possible, and rethinking dual enrollment as an on-ramp to debt-free, career-connected education.

These points bear on the cost discussion in Follins’s column. Lower tuition helps only when credits count toward the degree the student wants, so the questions below matter as much as the price.

Questions to ask a community college

1. Does the college publish a clear program map that shows which courses to take, in what order, for each program?
2. Will the credits transfer to the four-year schools I am considering, and does the college have written agreements with them?
3. What share of students in my program finish, and what jobs or further study do graduates go on to? Ask for the college’s own figures and the date they were produced.
4. What advising and support services will I have in my first term, and how are students helped to choose a program?
5. If I am still in high school, can dual enrollment courses count toward a program at no cost to my family?

Follins gives a personal reason for thinking a community college might be part of a student’s future, namely that credits earned there later transferred to a four-year institution. The research above suggests that this kind of path works best when a college plans for transfer and careers from the beginning, which is what a good pathway is designed to do.

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