In April 2020, Alejandra Guerra, 23, started working at Amazon while finishing her associate degree in criminal justice at Sacramento City College. Working nights and weekends at the warehouse near the Sacramento airport, she earned $18.70 an hour, nearly five dollars more than she had been making prior to the pandemic as a secretary.
The hours were grueling: She finished her last warehouse shift of the week at 5:30 a.m. on Monday and started class, online, at 8 a.m. “I have very bad ADHD, so it’s very hard for me to concentrate when I’m sitting in front of a laptop, especially when I just worked a 10-and-a-half-hour shift,” she said. “I’m just thinking about sleep.”
She dropped out of school in May 2020 with about seven classes left to graduate. More than three years later, she still hasn’t returned, making her part of an emerging trend among community college students ages 20 to 30. While other age groups are returning to college following a drop during the COVID-19 pandemic, these twentysomethings are the last holdouts.
At its lowest point following the start of the pandemic, the California Community Colleges system had lost just over 417,000 students, an 18.5% drop compared to the 2018–19 academic year. That was a 30-year low. The decline means colleges risk losing state funds in the near future, since their funding is pegged in part to enrollment. In the long-term, it means employers may grapple with a less educated or less skilled workforce.
Enrollment numbers grew by about 5% in the 2022–23 school year, according to data provided by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It’s the most recent data available, though numbers are not yet official. Early estimates from various community college districts show enrollment gains continuing into this fall, too.
But that rebound is uneven: it stems largely from high school students who are taking college classes, and to a lesser extent, from adults over 30 who are returning to college after leaving at record rates during the pandemic. Meanwhile, students in their 20s, like Guerra, continued to leave college. The state’s 116 community colleges lost more than 13,000 students between the ages of 20 and 30 last year, about a 2% decline in that population compared to the previous year.
The result is a demographic shift across the community college system. For over a decade, it was students between 20 and 30 years old who made up the plurality of students on campus. Last year, it was students under 20 who represented the largest group. These youth, particularly those in high school, have become central to the strategy of California Community College Chancellor Sonya Christian, who has said she wants to require every ninth-grader in California to enroll in a community college course.
Low unemployment means low enrollment for some colleges
Administrators say there is no single explanation as to why this generation of twentysomethings is lagging behind the rest. For one, the age group isn’t monolithic, and students with different racial or ethnic backgrounds showed differing trends. The population of Asian and Filipino students in their 20s declined by 6% and 12%, respectively, while the number of African American and Native students in the same age group increased by a few percentage points compared to the previous year. Another possible explanation comes from a recent survey of the state’s community college students, which found that roughly one-third of students between the ages of 21 and 30 had experienced homelessness in the past year (PDF) — a higher rate than any other age group.
