Recognizing and Responding to the Untold Stories: How COVID-19 Affected Community College Students’ Decision to Withdraw

Abstract

ABSTRACT The research paper is an investigation of student withdrawal in an urban community college that primarily serves working-class students, students of color, and first-generation college-goers. Community college students face a myriad of challenges that are not always obvious to faculty and often invisible to the institutions that serve them. At the same time, community colleges and the students they educate are often unfairly characterized as “less than,” suggesting how little they are understood. Nationally, community college students are nearly half of all undergraduates before the COVID-19 pandemic, but less than 40% of them graduate within six years. Additionally, the community college enrollment decline in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic is causing alarm. As attempts to increase enrollment get underway, this research aims to demonstrate how previous obstacles collided with new complications brought by the pandemic and made college-going beyond challenging for many students. It is the author’s hope that these findings can shed new and much-needed light on recognizing these hardships and that higher education institutions can respond in ways that better support community college students.