The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a significant disruption of our higher education system, causing great uncertainty regarding our short and long-term future. College of the Redwoods, which serves an average of 7,000 students per year, has always been a primarily face-to-face institution but the pandemic has necessitated our transition to a predominantly distant learning environment where staff work remotely. We are now seeing just how much this transition has negatively affected our enrollments, caused great uncertainty in our budget, greatly limited access to our curriculum, and essentially exacerbated an already widening student equity gap.  

An article written by Lawrence Lanahan and on pbs.org on January 19 titled “It’s Just Too Much: Why Some Students are Abandoning Community Colleges” focused on how community colleges all over the country have suffered the same stress as CR as they transition from face-to-face to virtual instruction and student services. The change has forced some students to make hard choices and, in some instances, to put off college altogether—especially those students who struggle academically and financially.

Lanahan writes, “community colleges tend to attract those whose precarious finances have been hurt most by the pandemic, and who needed greater guidance from administrators and faculty at the very moment that those officials were stepping back from in-person recruitment and services.” Furthermore, “if those trends continue, they could exacerbate existing racial and socioeconomic gaps in higher education, as four-year schools, which tend to serve wealthier and whiter populations, bounce back more quickly while the pandemic hollows out community colleges that have been slowly leaking students for a decade.”

As a college administrator, this news is disconcerting, especially since, by all accounts, the virus is here to stay. Scientists believe that we will eventually, through vaccination and natural infection, reach a point where COVID-19 is no more of a threat than the common cold, but until that time, we are going to have to deal with a lot of ambiguity. The science tells us that it will take a few years for the virus to move from pandemic to endemic—depending on how fast it spreads through the population, the number of people inoculated against the virus, and how quickly our systems build up immunity.

Although this gives me a glimmer of hope, I am concerned that the students we have lost as a result of the pandemic may never return to college. Students will chose to “stop out” and settle for low-paying jobs rather than going after the skills they need to improve their prospects. This is potentially disastrous for a generation of students, not to mention our region’s economic recovery. 

For these reasons, it is extremely important that College of the Redwoods returns to normal operations as soon as a possible. Of course, this will require balancing the above-mentioned imperatives with the health and safety concerns of our community and with our new budget realities. The hope is that we can offer predominately face-to-face instruction and services in fall 2021 as safely and effectively as possible.

However, one positive aspect of the pandemic may be that we are actually learning how to accommodate more students by offering additional modalities, like hybrid classes, that will work for a greater number of students by allowing them to attend college while still maintaining a job, caring for family, and/or seeing to other personal responsibilities. We intend to announce our plan to reopen in sufficient time to allow students to prepare, both financially and intellectually, for college.

While reopening under these circumstances will undoubtedly prove challenging, I am proud that CR’s Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, and administration share one common interest—providing equitable community access to our curriculum and services and protecting the health and safety of everyone. We are working together to develop strategies that represent our best thinking for bringing students, faculty, staff, and administrators back to our Eureka, Del Norte and Klamath-Trinity campuses, as well as strategies that will allow us to seamlessly move back to remote instruction, should that, once again, be necessary.