Advocates for community colleges defend them as the underdogs of America’s higher education system, left to serve the students who need the most support but without the money required to provide it. Critics contend that this has become an excuse for poor success rates that are only getting worse and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately prompted Camara to drop out after two semesters; he now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

“I seriously tried,” Camara said. “I gave it my all. But you’re sort of screwed from the get-go.”

With scant advising, many community college students spend time and money on courses that won’t transfer or that they don’t need. Though most intend to move on to get bachelor’s degrees, only a small fraction succeed; fewer than half earn any kind of a credential. Even if they do, a new survey finds that most employers don’t believe they’re ready for the workforce.

Now these failures are coming home to roost.

Even though community colleges are far cheaper than four-year schools —published tuition and fees last year averaged $3,860, versus $39,400 at private and $10,940 at public four-year universities, with many states making community college free and President Joe Biden proposing free community college nationwide — consumers are abandoning them in droves.

“The reckoning is here,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Although the enrollment drop-off sped up during the Covid-19 pandemic, it started long before then. The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37 percent since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Those numbers would be even more grim if they didn’t include high school students taking dual-enrollment courses, who the colleges count in their enrollment but on whom they’re losing money, according to the CCRC. High school students now make up nearly a fifth of community college enrollment and at 31 community colleges, the majority of it.

Yet even as these colleges serve a significantly smaller number of students, their already low success rates have by at least one measure gotten worse.

Two-year community colleges have the worst completion rates of any kind of universities and colleges. Like Camara, nearly half of students drop out, within a year, of the community college where they started. Only slightly more than 40 percent finish within six years. That was up by just under 1 percentage point last year from the year before.

Read the full article about community college completion rates by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.