Photo: Whitten Sabbatini

Colleges of all types are struggling under the shadow of the coronavirus, but the nation’s community college system has been disproportionately hurt, with tens of thousands of students being forced to delay school or drop out because of the pandemic and the economic crisis it has created.

Many community college students are adults—the average age is 28—and even before the pandemic, they struggled to stay in school, juggling academic work with financial pressures, child care needs, and even homelessness. For Corey Ray Baranowski—a 33-year-old father of five children, age 5 months to 11 years old—the breaking point came last year.

The pandemic has had a profound effect on college enrollment. Colleges are missing more than half a million students, according to new data. Community colleges have taken the hardest hit. So what are schools doing to find and enroll new students, while holding on to the ones who enrolled before the pandemic?

College leaders, researchers, and others discuss the implications of the enrollment decline for higher ed and the economy at large—plus how some institutions are fighting back with aggressive recruitment and innovative ideas.

Photo: Paul Sakuma

The pandemic has taken an outsized economic toll on young workers, who disproportionately hold jobs in hard-hit sectors such as retail, hospitality, and food service. Unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds soared from 10 percent in March 2020 to 26 percent in April, with the highest rates of joblessness among Black and Latino youth.

In theory, the federal government's Job Corps program is supposed to help. The program, however, has performed poorly for decades. Worst of all, inattention has led to years of underinvestment in new approaches that show promise for young people.