A Longitudinal QuantCrit Study of Disaggregated Community College Enrollment: How Economic and Institutional Contexts Shaped Open Access from 2017 to 2021
Ayse O’DonnellBackground:
Community colleges are central access points to postsecondary education, particularly for racially minoritized, low-income, first-generation, and adult students. However, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified existing inequalities in health, employment, and educational access. Understanding how community college enrollment changed before and after the COVID-19 outbreak requires attention not only to aggregate trends but also to how institutional and labor market conditions shaped enrollment differently across race and gender.
Purpose:
This study examines how institutional and labor market conditions shaped first-time degree-seeking community college enrollment at the intersection of race and gender in the United States before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. The study centers the COVID-19 outbreak as a natural intervention that exposed how systemic inequities in health, employment security, and educational opportunity affected access to open-access community colleges.
Research Design:
Using national datasets from 2017 to 2021, this study applied a Quantitative Critical Race (QuantCrit) approach and a longitudinal multilevel mixed-effects design. The analysis focused on first-time degree-seeking enrollment in open-access community colleges, disaggregated by race and gender. Institutional characteristics, minority-serving institution status, and local labor market conditions were included as key predictors, with the COVID-19 period modeled as a critical disruption in enrollment patterns.
Conclusions:
The findings show that community college enrollment declines were sharpest for Black and Latina women, while enrollment patterns varied substantially across minority-serving colleges. Labor market conditions were also associated with racialized and gendered disparities: local unemployment was linked to higher White enrollment but lower enrollment for students of color, while growth in healthcare and social-service employment was associated with reduced enrollment for women of color. These findings suggest that institutional and economic contexts interact with racialized and gendered structures to shape who accesses higher education. The study calls for equity-centered policy approaches and more critical uses of quantitative data in postsecondary education research.