Steven Gallegos keeps a demanding schedule. As student body president at East Los Angeles College (ELAC), he pitches ideas for improving mental health services and distributes groceries to students in need. That’s on top of maintaining high grades in hopes of transferring to UCLA.
Yet for all his involvement, Gallegos, 46, has not set foot in a classroom this semester. Instead he takes all his courses online, stealing time to complete exams and participate in class discussions between student government duties and serving as the main caregiver for his aging mother.
“Pretty much wherever I have time, that’s where I do my work,” he said.
Gallegos is among the thousands of California community college students who have changed the way they are pursuing higher education by opting for online classes in eye-popping numbers. The demand for virtual classes represents a dramatic shift in how instruction is delivered in one of the nation’s largest systems of public higher education and stands as an unexpected legacy of the pandemic.
Although students were forced into virtual instruction by the COVID-19 emergency in March 2020, they soon found greater flexibility online, much like the U.S. labor force. For a population of students who tend to be older and come from low-income backgrounds, moving online enables them to more easily juggle work, child care and family responsibilities. The high cost of commuting is gone, too.
In pre-pandemic fall 2019, 80 percent of community college classes were fully in person, 15 percent were fully remote and 5 percent were hybrid, a mix of online and in person, according to a state report. Two years later, the numbers were nearly flipped, with 25 percent of classes in person, 65 percent remote and 10 percent hybrid.
Statewide numbers for fall 2022 are not yet available. But on questionnaires and through class registration, students consistently indicate they want virtual options.
“It may never go back to what it was before the pandemic,” said Daniel Payares-Montoya, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California who has studied enrollment in online classes at community colleges. “Students are going to keep demanding more and more online education.”
The monumental shift online comes amid plummeting state enrollment — which stood at 1.2 million students in fall 2021, about a 20 percent drop from pre-pandemic fall 2019. Administrators pivoted to accommodate the change, rather than risk losing more students. They say it’s a matter of making community colleges accessible, a fundamental mission of the system.
But the move also raises questions about how to maintain quality instruction so students make progress toward graduation and how campus facility needs might change. Also, many students still want an in-person campus experience, making scheduling tricky for colleges.
For his part, Gallegos wants options. He plans to ease back into in-person classes at ELAC next semester, once his schedule slows down.
“Different students want different things.” But, Gallegos said, “traditional days are done.”
Weeks before the start of the spring 2022 semester at San José City College and Evergreen Valley College, Jessica Breheny answered panicked emails from fellow faculty. Enrollment for in-person courses was low and educators feared their classes could be canceled.
Earlier, students of the two Santa Clara County schools signaled their desire for online classes in surveys. Demand for virtual options soon outpaced availability during registration, Breheny said. Students who wanted to take online or hybrid classes landed on waitlists, while many in-person classes were below capacity.
Officials scrapped dozens of classes that failed to meet enrollment expectations — and most of those classes were in person. Some part-time faculty lost work. Breheny worried that students who had enrolled in the canceled classes would grow discouraged.
Ryan Brown, a spokesperson for the San José-Evergreen Community College District, said that in the same survey, students indicated they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to take in-person classes.
“Everything that we have indicates that what students want is variety and options,” he said. This fall, Brown said, nearly 40 percent of classes at both San José and Evergreen are fully remote.
At other campuses across the state, online enrollment also remains strong this academic year.
In the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District, 50 percent of classes are remote, 7 percent are hybrid and 43 percent are in person, according to district data.
Marty Alvarado, executive vice chancellor for educational services at California Community Colleges, said she believes the system is ready to handle its new virtual reality. “We have been preparing,” she said.
Heading into the fall 2022 semester, Los Angeles City College administrators kept close watch on enrollment. Finding the right mix of in-person and online classes was a challenge. In some instances, administrators converted in-person classes with low interest to virtual classes after students started registering, said Carol Kozeracki, dean of academic affairs.
The college also kept other services online, including counseling and financial aid assistance. At the campus writing center, tutors help students edit essays over Zoom using the screen-sharing function.
The new reality presents challenges.
In 2014, the Public Policy Institute of California published a report that found community college students were less successful in online courses than in traditional courses and that online learning exacerbated achievement gaps.
However, the same report found that students who took an online course were more likely to earn an associate’s degree or transfer to a four-year university than those who did not take an online class. And more recent data has shown that students are now completing online classes at nearly the same rate as in-person courses.
“I’m sure there is a wide variation. You still have some online courses where they are not the best,” said Marisol Cuellar Mejia, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “But there have been efforts to improve the quality.”
At Bakersfield College, every instructor is required to take three 16-week courses about providing distance education. They learn lessons on fostering online communities and building virtual classes on Canvas, an online learning platform.
“We have a lot of our younger students who want to be face to face,” said Emmanuel Mourtzanos, a vice chancellor in the Kern Community College District, which includes Bakersfield. “But I think that a lot of our older students are saying, ‘I never thought that this was possible.’”
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