As a fight over the future of elite higher education consumes university leaders and politicians, most college students live in a very different world with very different challenges. Community colleges, along with regional public universities, are the workhorses of higher education in the United States, which has roughly 4,000 degree-granting schools. Some nine million students are enrolled at community colleges, accounting for 43 percent of America’s undergraduates. Many of these students — nearly three in four — are enrolled on a part-time basis, squeezing in a handful of classes for slow, sometimes unsteady progress toward a degree. They are often drawn to community colleges because of lower tuition costs, schedule flexibility, smaller classes and proximity to home.
