‘Meeting students where they are’

Facing enrollment declines that date to the Great Recession and accelerated during the worst of the pandemic, community colleges are redoubling their focus on student-readiness to seem — and become — as welcoming as possible through efforts ranging from diversity, equity and inclusion, to other cultural changes, to even facilities redesign. In doing so, two-year schools say they know that while enrollment figures are expressed in numbers, they’re made up of thousands of individuals who matriculate — and hopefully complete — and that obsessing about the overall numbers risks missing the forest for the trees.