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| California Community Colleges
California Tomorrow works to strengthen the capacity of California community colleges to improve access and success for students of color, immigrants and low-income students.
California Tomorrow believes that a strong community college system is integral to a thriving, multicultural, and prosperous California. Throughout the state, community colleges serve as a bridge to opportunity, re-engaging under-educated young Californians and working adults, moving students of color and immigrants through the pipeline to Bachelor’s degrees, and providing access to workforce opportunities for low-income communities. For Californians who have traditionally faced barriers to schooling, the California Community College System is the main gateway to higher education and a brighter future. But the ability of the 109 colleges to fulfill their mission - to provide access to higher education to all Californians – is threatened by insufficient funding at a time when demand for affordable, accessible higher education is growing at an unprecedented rate.
Our work with community colleges grew out of California Tomorrow’s publication, California’s Gold: Claiming the Promise of Diversity in California Community Colleges (2003), a groundbreaking study that identified opportunities and challenges facing community college leaders as they attempt to respond to an increasingly diverse and under prepared student body. The urgency for the book was fueled by demographic research suggesting that community colleges will soon have to accommodate an additional 600,000 students seeking a pathway into higher education. Currently, one million adults in California are without a high school diploma.
The pressures associated with this unprecedented growth are daunting. Given that the community college system is the least funded system of public education in California, the ability of community colleges to respond to these challenges will require substantially greater resources, active leadership and effective models to realign their institutional practices.
Our Community College Access and Equity Initiative helps Community College leaders to respond to these increasing pressures. - The Campus Change Network, initiated and facilitated by California Tomorrow, provides capacity building and technical assistance to community colleges that are working to develop comprehensive reform strategies to improve academic success among their rapidly changing student bodies.
- California Tomorrow undertakes public education and advocacy to address the access and equity issues that most impact the success of students of color, immigrants and low-income students.
- Through alliance building, we make and strengthen connections among community college access and equity advocates, civil rights groups, educational equity and community organizations, business leaders, and policy makers who understand the community colleges to be a critical part of California’s public infrastructure, and vital to our future workforce.
We thank our Statewide Advisory Committee for helping to shape our research and guide the policy recommendations at the heart of the Community College Access & Equity Initiative.
Visit our Resources section to learn more about our resources and publications that focus on California’s Community Colleges. |
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