Community Colleges at the Crossroads

California’s community colleges serve over 2.1 million students and constitute by far the largest higher education system in simple student numbers of any in the country, far outstripping the California State, SUNY and other state systems. I taught at nine of these community college campuses across the course of thirteen years, an experience as common and kaleidoscopic as America itself.  Given who this system serves, a vast and diverse working-class, it has become both microcosm and mirror of many of this nation’s practical aspirations and pressing concerns.

Despite rarely registering as more than an afterthought in national discourse, community college education, they provide benefits that resonate across generations and speak to our everyday future. Lightcast, a non-partisan data and analytics provider to colleges, universities and companies, in its May 2025 report on the California community colleges found that for the 2023-24 academic year the system produced $156.6 billion in added income to the state, including $8 billion added income in student spending impact, $7.3 billion in operations spending impact, and $1.1 billion in construction spending impact. Supporting one of every fifteen California jobs, the colleges and their students in total support more than 1.5 million jobs across our largest state.

Crucially, the community colleges educate students at a fraction of the cost of universities and train students in a much wider array of workforce-ready occupations.

With Gen Z’s vast working class currently coming of age fully aware of the student loan debt burden that their Gen X and millennial forebears will carry to their graves and consequently wary of university education, the community colleges sit at a crossroads in our class and culture wars.

The solution to this Higher Education Problem will not be to jettison advanced study, nor to do Turning Point-style culture war on campuses, as many on the right would like, but to expand our vision of what community and college are, and what they can be.

Off a busy boulevard just outside East Oakland sits San Leandro Upholstery, a car repair and detailing outfit owned and operated by Larry Arnold, a white man who was born in East Oakland in 1955. “White flight,” Arnold explains, was the impetus for his family’s move from Oakland to Lodi, California in the 60s. When, a decade on, Lodi’s public high school decided to defund and shutter the Shop program where he thrived as a student, Arnold made his own move: Chaining himself to the principal’s office door in protest, he tried to get arrested. But when some unimpressed cops showed up, they refused to play along. His chains were broken and the Shop program terminated, a de-industrialization episode replicated across America.

When I sat with him amidst the creative clutter of his shop, Arnold recounted to me his frustrated efforts to take on a young Black man as an apprentice, which ended with the teen buying Arnold a gift card as thanks for preparing him for a “real job.”

The apprentice’s choice of words reproduces the disregard that American society itself shows towards the trades. The emergence of costly for-profit vocational schools and trade schools function as a barrier rather than a gateway to training for the people who most need these pathways. By contrast, California community colleges offer more than two-hundred Career Education programs at a fraction of for-profit private school costs. But too many people, like Larry Arnold’s erstwhile mentee, are either unaware or dismissive of these opportunities.

Data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook underlines the reality that numerous skilled trades are well-paying, do not require a 4-year college education and are growing at rates faster than the national average. What many of these jobs—air traffic controller, radiation therapist, electrician, etc.—do require is an Associate’s degree, which logically aligns them with the mission of community college workforce development.

Yet the neglect of the trades and underfunding of related training programs is widespread. “I lived the stigma around Career Technical Education,” one community college president, Angel Reyna of Madera Community College, told me, that stigma being that “If you can’t [graduate university], just go get a certificate at the local community college… you’re not 4-year material.”

Beyond specific policies, there’s been a decades-long cultural tide that has turned generations of Americans away from training in the trades, as well as from basic respect for these social roles and the people who fill them. This cultural tide began with the prerogatives of corporations seeking cheaper overhead abroad, but economics becomes culture and culture flows beyond economic logics. Even though skilled trades are now in demand, America’s ideological shifts, homed in things deeper than dollars and cents, will take some time to rise to meet it.

America’s de-industrialization and our stigmatization of the trades has had an especially disastrous impact on Black America. “You know as well as I,” Arnold preached to me, “Black youth are having a helluva time [finding employment].” And, indeed, the lack of Black employment in the trades is tied to all manner of issues, from drug addiction to absent fathers, an unemployment rate that since the 60s has remained fixed for Black Americans at twice the white rate, to crime, the vast majority of which is perpetrated by rootless, poorly educated young men.

Derrick Newton had lived at least one lifetime by the time he found his way to my classroom in San Jose, California.

Raised in 70s and 80s Oakland, Derrick suffered the fate of many a marginalized child. In sixth grade, he wrote a poem that won a school poetry contest, only for the contest organizers to decide that he must not have written the poem himself because he was a Special Education student. Another student was given the honor of reading Derrick’s poem before the school. “It really killed my spirit,” he remembers.

He dropped out of school and into the streets. “I never felt a part of the school, but I did feel a part of the streets because it was real. Motherfucker beat you up and take your shit. Ain’t no sugarcoatin it… I was hustlin’ little dollar joints…”

Then crack hit. The year was 1985.

“We called it hubba rocks,” Derrick recalls. “Money accumulated fast.” A year later he had $15,000 stashed in Nike shoeboxes that he didn’t know what to do with, the product of a booming cocaine economy that spiraled out of everyone’s control. At the height of the crack wars, he was clocking six-figures— until he was shot nine times and left for dead.

Somehow, he survived.

Serving as a hospital staffer at Stanford, he struggled to write up reports. The insecurity born from bad experiences in school was back, but this time his girlfriend, tired of writing the reports for him, pushed him to return to school.

Sometimes I feel like I taught community college almost everywhere to almost everyone, but in reality, it was at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose that I worked by far the longest and it was my time working with Derrick that proved most definitional of my experience and his.

“Evergreen was boot camp. My education came from Evergreen,” Derrick says now. “That Associates [degree] holds more weight [than his B.A.]. That’s where I learned everything.”

Derrick’s since completed a B.A., M.F.A. and is now one class from completion of his M.B.A. He currently serves as a paraprofessional behavior technician for special needs children in Salinas, California.

“My route to education was totally different. But I appreciate that when God was ready for me to accept this knowledge, I was able to receive it and enjoy and learn with people I feel comfortable with. I love education. I love reading. I love being by myself.”

Our community colleges operate along a vast American periphery, which is, paradoxically, also at the heart of the nation. In recent weeks, as I traveled from Oakland and Silicon Valley, through the San Joaquin’s verdant farmlands, and down to the Inland Empire’s sweltering industrial core, I’ve reflected not just on my work with Derrick and other community college students, but on the enterprise and the potential of community college itself. I’ve come to believe that now more than ever we need to flip the discussion of higher education in America, prioritize our community colleges and the people they serve, and in so doing turn against the currents of the culture wars, and win back the left’s connection to America’s working class.

Silicon Desert, Silicon Valley

Born in a mountainous region of Puerto Rico, Angel Fuentes came to Arizona to study stars. After finishing an M.S. in Physics with a focus in Astronomy at Arizona State University, Fuentes worked for years as an astronomer. The plaque on his office wall that records Asteroid Fuentes, a small piece of space matter that’s named after him, hints at this past life. But it was while living in Arizona that he began to understand just how central technology was to the economic lifeblood of the region, the burgeoning Silicon Desert of the southwest. Already a professor at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, he became an associate dean of workforce development in 2020 and an early adopter of artificial intelligence technology. It was in that role that he established the nation’s first Associates degree in A.I., a program that extended to the 2-year degree level training in technologies that at the time still seemed remote to the average American.

Artificial intelligence is a complicated monster. Fuentes’s work in that domain is necessary in the immediate term: Providing the people who are most exposed to economic volatility the tools they need to turn the new industry to their advantage. Yet in the long run, the overarching necessity will not be to educate people in AI, but to protect them from its most detrimental impacts, especially the job losses that are its likeliest consequence across all economic sectors.

Fuentes now works in Silicon Valley. Serving as dean of business and workforce development at Evergreen Valley College, he’s ironically situated, for it’s actually the suburbs that sit outside San Jose— Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Palo Alto particularly— that host the most lucrative tech companies in the world.

That his students are surrounded by the wealth of an industry that they consume but are not a part of is problematic, Fuentes tells me, disruptive of a real understanding of what jobs are out there for them. “So many other great workforce programs that are not necessarily tech-related are suffering in engagement and interest of students, especially young students.” He name-checks nursing, electrical, urban planning and a host of necessary professions. “Everybody wants to be a TikTok star and not everyone can be. Everyone wants to work in tech, at Meta and Google, but there are not enough jobs for everyone to be in that space… There’s an idea of what tech is in people’s minds that is glamorous. When young students think about manufacturing, for example, they think of sweating and stamping sheet metal…” He searches for the best way to explain the gap between stigma and reality. “It’s not what used to be in the 50s. They’re not building cars by lifting engines.”

While some students do go on to great careers in tech, Fuentes notes, it is also true that there is a distressing immediate term decline in employment in tech— Computer Science graduates who lack experience in AI are having a particularly difficult time— and that there has also been jarring volatility in the industry over the past five years.

The tech sector long ago hijacked the Bay Area, killing off affordable housing, and removing with it so many people and so much of our culture. What is left is a youth population too new to remember the losses; many of them too caught up in the perpetual hype cycle of tech to see beyond its illusory screens.

The Central Valley

For Angel Reyna, president of California’s newest community college, Madera Community College, the necessity to prioritize skilled trades within the systems of higher education is obvious. Reyna grew up as a migrant farmworker in Mabton, Washington state, a small rural farming community where he worked alongside his family members, oftentimes braving difficult weather to farm the land. School was, at first, an escape from grinding toil and a place to socialize with someone other than his brothers and sisters. But soon enough, he saw the service potential in education, the paths it opened for him and for others from similar backgrounds. As a young adult, he taught ESL, before moving on and up, serving in a series of workforce development roles, including a position as dean of workforce development at Walla Walla Community College and vice president of instruction at Renton Technical College. Co-extensive with those educational roles, Reyna also rose through rural Washington’s political ranks, becoming mayor of Mabton, a remarkable rise from childhood field hand labor.

Understood too simply, Reyna’s story might be read as the achievement of one talented individual above the circumstances of his birth, but what any investigation of the ways community college and the communities that it serves will reveal is that the American dream fiction of endless ascent runs contrary to the realities of the work that people like Reyna do. Rather than leaving the fields and the people in them behind, Reyna’s work returns him to them, not just through a mayoralty, but in many complicated and quotidian ways.

While Reyna has experienced the stigma associated with vocational education, he’ll also tell you that industry realities contradict our educational hierarchies. “When you talk to local business and industry, they will not relocate to your area or open a new business in your area if you don’t have a skilled workforce—and they don’t go to your transfer students for that. They go to your CTE programs… I’m not gonna bring a billion-dollar industry to your area if you can’t supply the workforce.”

It is no accident Reyna was recruited to this newly built rural community college. Madera, both the town and the college, sit in the southern section of California’s Central Valley, that vast heartland at the outer brink of America. Like so much that I have found in these travels, the Central Valley at once sits at the geographic periphery of the nation, yet it occupies, in its agricultural product, our very center. For though it uses less than 1 percent of US farmland, the Central Valley supplies 8 percent of US agricultural output (by value) and produces a quarter of our food, including 40 percent of our fruits, nuts, and other table foods. Without this produce, our lives would be very different. And more to the point, without the farm labor of migrant workers, this region and nation would be vastly less resourced and less nourished.

Yet it has been precisely the conditions of migrant labor in the Central Valley that have been so contentious historically. My mother’s family came from the American south to the Central Valley in the mid-20th century seeking better opportunities beyond the press of Jim Crow laws and racial terrorism, only to find the oppressive labor practices that were the rule of the day in California’s fields. With the coalescence of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association into the United Farm Workers and the success of the Delano grape boycott, wages and working conditions finally improved in the 1970s.

That history, not to mention the current administration’s threats to migrant labor and thus to this breadbasket of the nation, resonate with me as I listen to President Reyna explain the college’s plans to turn the grape fields that sit just beyond campus grounds into the foundation of an agave distilling program for Madera students. There’s something poetic in the repurposing of this soil for the benefit of the sons and daughters of migrant laborers such that instead of picking produce on hands and knees, they will be able to organize production processes at a more agential level.

While the agave distilling program lies a couple years out, the facilities required for its implementation still under development, Madera already offers its vocational students trucking and nursing programs that can set them a path directly into the workforce.

Where the college faces challenges in up-skilling its students, it is a matter of underfunding, which ultimately amounts to under-investment in our students. President Reyna rattles off to me a whole series of programs in healthcare that he would love to offer at Madera but at present cannot because the facilities and the money for the facilities is not there.

As I leave, I ask where in Madera he’d recommend I go to get a real understanding of the area, its people, their needs. He directs me to the massive children’s hospital— Valley Children’s Hospital, the new economic core of the county.

The Inland Empire

By turns suburban and ex-urban and uniformly, unforgivingly hot, southern California’s Inland Empire draws no national attention, which is in large part because focus on the region reveals a California very different from fantasies of and rhetoric about the state: Despite its suburbs, the region is not wealthy, nor full of easily caricatured Hollywood elites, and it absolutely is not glamorous.

“Degree attainment,” Dr. Olivia Rosas, director of Employment Development at San Bernardino Valley College, explains, “is low,” 26 percent of area high schoolers on track currently for college graduation compared with 35 percent statewide, and thus the need for employment programs high.

San Bernardino’s demographics mean that when I convene a circle of students Quichulle, Anyla, Hunter and J-Money tell me about their HBCU-going goals, the ratio of Black women specifically much higher here than in most colleges across the state. But having taught a primarily white student population in northern California, and San Jose’s majority Vietnamese and Latino student base, as well as every other demographic that California contains, I can safely say that young people everywhere are vacillating between conventional college goals and the demands of a changing economy.

In San Bernardino that means whether to go to college or go to work at the Amazon warehouse fulfillment centers that have inundated the area. PBS Frontline’s Amazon Empire documentary exposes the brutal work conditions in San Bernardino’s warehouses.

Yet the anti-college argument persists. Student-athlete Aisake Esau: “If you see yourself wanting to do something else, I say do that. College is not for everyone. There’s easier ways to make money than coming to college and getting in debt.”

True.

But the warehouses are not necessarily that easier way, as Mauricio Patino, an SBVC and Cal State San Bernardino grad who now tutors at SBVC, details. After explaining his own hard-won graduation path, he cites as contrast his brother. Equally hard-working, he’s taken a different route, working his way up to operations manager at a local warehouse. “I look up to him,” Mauricio confides, noting how well his brother supports his wife and children. Yet, Mauricio tells me, he also worries about his brother’s work hours, the fact that he’s on call 3PM to 3AM, the toll that’s taking on his health.

SBVC professor EJ Jones questions the basic tenability of the grueling work warehouses demand of students: “Amazon sees the student as a lemon who will voluntarily be squeezed,” whereas the student is forced to assert themselves “as an individual with a dream finding a way to keep something of themselves for themselves. A tough task for an already stressful life.”

Our media’s focus on higher education is decisively top down, the numbers of stories published about Ivy League and other elite universities easily outstripping those related to the places where most Americans are actually educated. This is no surprise since so many journalists went to elite universities and thus have more access to and better understanding of these schools than they do of community colleges and other public education institutions. It’s a difficult needle to thread in the current political reality, with elite universities under severe and unjust attack, the Trump administration unseating presidents and threatening vital research funding based on a political rationale that is absurd on its face. Our universities should be protected from such attacks.

But we should also question their primacy in higher education discourse and the excesses that flow therefrom. In 2013 when then-president of Harvard Drew Faust publicly announced her intention to increase the university’s already world-leading endowment by $6.5 billion over five years, donations surged, exceeding Faust’s goal in two and a half years. As education journalist Paul Tough writes in The Inequality Machine, even this watershed success “didn’t stop the money deluge. The school’s take soon hit $7 billion, and then $8 billion, and then $9 billion.” As of March 2025, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn boasted the first, second, fourth and sixth largest endowments in America and in the world.

In “Diversifying Society’s Leaders?: The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges” Raj Chetty, David J. Demming and John N. Friedman track that “Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges,” which the authors define as the eight Ivy League colleges, as well as the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford. “Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century,” a staggering, cross-sector consequence of American elitism.

By contrast, our relative disinterest and disinvestment in the community colleges has had consequences. “From a budgetary standpoint we are packaged in with K-12,” Dr. Belinda Lum, Associate Professor of Sociology at Sacramento City College, explains. But “we don’t have as much money [allotted by the state] as the K-12 [system], and per student we’re funded so much less than our [university] counterparts.”

Class warfare is real and operates almost entirely top down, capitalists leveraging their power and influence to marginalize working-class people. “Higher education, really most public education of any kind in this country was not meant for the people who are in community colleges,” Professor Iyelli Ichille of Prince George’s Community College in Maryland told me, addressing the core issue. “These weren’t people that [elites] expected or wanted to or intended to have degrees, or any modicum of education. These are supposed to be workers, ignorant workers, and the fact that we’re creating space for them to receive education and certifications and degrees wasn’t the intention. We’re essentially fighting against the ethos and the intention of higher education.”

Following from this ethos and intention, where community colleges have entered our public discourse, it has, too often, been as prelude to punishing them for serving as actual institutions of public education. Low graduation rates, specifically, come in for criticism, an argument which evades the reality that those who have the least access to higher education are often least prepared, at least initially, for conventional college classwork. The strong response is simply to declare education for all as non-negotiable and to fight from there, uprooting educational elitism as an ideology and ultimately undoing our indifference to the public good.

And maybe the tide is turning, national outlets finally speaking to the unique position that community colleges occupy in what is a complicated American reckoning—and the opportunity they present for so many.

Think about a resuming student, a mother maybe, struggling through the first classes that she has taken in years. She is frustrated, she is failing, but if she persists, she will matriculate, maybe not this semester, and maybe not conventionally but via a non-degree granting vocational program. Now think about her children who witness this lonely journey, how they learn from her in ways they never would have if she hadn’t returned to school and how this witness might inspire them, not now, but years from now, well outside the sight of the metrics that measure their mother.

You can’t understand how our communities live, breathe and struggle without understanding how community colleges work, how they starve and strive. Nor can you understand our country, its periphery, its commons, its core.