School of Education Webinar Reveals Community College Students Still Prefer to Enroll Locally in the Online Era
California community college students have the option to take online classes from any campus in the state, opening an array of classes not available close to home. Despite this, UC Davis researchers have found that over the last 10 years, most students continue to enroll exclusively at their local community college campus. This finding was highlighted at the latest UC Davis School of Education webinar, “The Geography of California Community College Enrollment: Course-Taking Trends in the Online Era.”
Event speakers Drs. Michal Kurlaender (moderator), Cassandra Hart, and Robbie Linden, who recently published a report on the same topic, were initially surprised by this finding. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid growth of virtual learning, panelists had expected more students to take advantage of online courses offered at other community colleges. Instead, they found that learners continue to gravitate toward their home campuses, regardless of whether classes are virtual or in person. Results coincide with experiences of college leaders, including Dr. Whitney Yamamura, Chancellor of the Coast Community College District, who also spoke on the webinar panel.
That pattern has important implications for how colleges design online offerings, share student data, and support working adults. Speakers explained that students’ reasoning for seeking out particular campuses or class modalities can vary greatly depending on their learning goals. But how community colleges share information between districts—such as financial aid awards, academic progress, or advising recommendations—can also impact how and where students attend.
Read on for key data and insights on student enrollment trends across California Community Colleges. Excerpts have been lightly edited for print.
How has the expansion of online learning reshaped the way students enroll?
Robbie Linden: Over the pandemic period, but also in the years before, we saw a lot of expansion of online course-taking across the California community college system. When we looked at enrollment behavior by course modality (in-person, online, or hybrid), we saw really stark changes. For the 2018 cohort, over half of students were enrolled entirely in in-person courses, about 44 percent were enrolled in a mix of online and in-person courses, and only about 3 percent were enrolled entirely online. By the 2022 cohort, the most common modality of enrollment was multimodal. About two-thirds of students are enrolled in a mix of online and in-person courses.
Whitney Yamamura: A lot of what we assumed anecdotally during and after COVID is validated in the research. Faculty were forced to offer courses online, and many of them found they enjoyed teaching online. At the same time, demand from students increased.
Has increased online access changed where students enroll geographically?
Linden: What we see in the research is that the overall non-proximate enrollment rate—students enrolling outside a 30-mile radius—was pretty stable pre-pandemic at around 10 percent and only grew modestly to about 12 percent. One really surprising finding is that among students enrolled only in online courses, non-proximate enrollment actually declined over time. As the supply of online courses increased at local institutions, those enrollments became more local.
Cassandra Hart: That pattern really follows the story that as more online options are offered at home campuses, students can look elsewhere, but increasingly, they don’t have to.
What do enrollment patterns reveal about students’ needs?
Hart: There are certain groups that are more likely to be cross-enrolling across the board, and online in particular. Older students, age 24 and up, stand out as having higher rates of both in-person and online cross-enrollment. We think that’s probably indicative of more constrained schedules for working adults. They may need evening classes or online options and therefore are more likely to look outside their home campus if those options aren’t available. We also see higher rates of online cross-enrollment for Black students compared to other groups, suggesting differences in how students access opportunities across campuses.
Yamamura: There’s often an assumption that community college students are mostly 19 to 22 years old, but typically the average age is much older. You have veterans returning from service and many adults with 40-hour-a-week jobs. That reality really matters when we think about flexibility.
How and why do students cross-enroll across colleges?
Linden: We do see an increase in students enrolling in multiple institutions, but it’s more modest than the shift in modality. For cohorts before the pandemic, about 14 percent were enrolled in multiple institutions in their first two years. That increased to about 18 percent in more recent cohorts. So even in the online era, it’s still much more common for students to be enrolled in one institution rather than multiple.
Hart: : When we look within a single term and define a student’s home campus based on where they were primarily enrolled in their first term, we see that both home and cross enrollments increased for online courses during the pandemic—but the uptick was especially sharp for home enrollments. That suggests that as online options become more available at the home campus, students don’t need to cross-enroll as much.
Yamamura: In a multi-college district, cross-enrollment can be very seamless. But once you go outside the district, students have to manage separate applications, IDs, and communications. That friction matters.
Why do some subjects drive more cross-enrollment than others?
Hart: Health really stands out, with very high in-person cross-enrollment. A lot of health courses are difficult to move online, and face-to-face offerings haven’t fully recovered everywhere, and we see similar patterns in physical sciences and biological sciences. On the other hand, subjects like business and management show very high levels of online cross-enrollment.
Yamamura: In career education especially, program availability matters. Some programs are only offered at one college in a region, so students will travel for those opportunities.
What questions does this raise moving forward?
Linden: One limitation of this study is that we don’t fully capture the “why” behind cross-enrollment. Future work could help explain whether students are doing this to meet transfer deadlines or access courses at critical points in their pathway.
Hart: There’s a lot of fertile ground for future research, especially around how institutions can support students more intentionally in this evolving enrollment landscape.
Yamamura: Our mission is open access. Expanding online and flexible modalities makes sense for how students and working adults need to receive education.
