Employers are losing faith in community colleges. That’s bad for grads and the labor market

In the midst of an ongoing labor shortage, employers have largely been reluctant to tap into a previously fertile source of potential job seekers: community colleges. That’s according to a new report from Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and the American Association of Community Colleges.

The report finds that though community colleges have traditionally served as a “middle skills” talent pipeline, they often produce graduates who lack the skills or know-how that employers need—even as companies have millions of positions that sit unfilled. While there are roughly 12.4 million community college students attending nearly 1,200 institutions around the country, a disconnect between what community colleges think employers need and what those employers actually say they need is creating a state of “disequilibrium, underserving the needs of aspiring workers, employers, and, ultimately, communities,” according to the report.

The disconnect is evident in the data: Only 36% of employers agree that community colleges produce work-ready employees. Only 26% strongly agree.

“Community colleges are supposed to be this portal—giving people an affordable opportunity, near where they live, to develop skills or start down the path to a four-year institution,” says Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and coleader of the Project on Managing the Future of Work. He says that while many schools do a good job of aligning their curriculums and programs with the needs of local employers, such schools are often the exception, even though “everyone [talks] a great game.”

Ultimately, what’s happened as a result of employers losing faith in community colleges to produce work-ready graduates is that they’ve turned to other sources of talent. Community colleges have, as a result, “lost ground” to other sources, Fuller says. For instance, some companies have started working directly with schools to create training programs.

Despite calls for expanded access to community college programs from some policymakers—including a free, universal community college plan put together by the Biden administration that has since been tabled—the numbers do show that community colleges are experiencing problems getting students through to graduation. Fuller says that only 30% of students enrolled in associate degree programs manage to graduate within three years.

So while these schools are designed to give millions of Americans a stepping stone to four-year universities and pathways to learning skills and finding jobs, by and large they appear to be failing.

Fixing the disconnect

With all of this in mind, it begs a question for members of Gen Z and other young students who may be weighing their options for getting a cost-effective education: Is community college worth it?

There’s no silver bullet to helping boost graduation rates, and there are a lot of reasons that students don’t end up earning their degrees—namely, many of them have jobs, families, and myriad other things going on in their lives that tend to take precedence over an English 101 class. As such, the “pipeline” designed to produce work-ready graduates for local employers “has a lot of holes in it,” Fuller says.

For potential community college students, there are a lot of things to consider. Fuller recommends thinking carefully about how you’ll balance a job, family commitments, and school, and doing some research into specific programs, as well as what types of employment outcomes those programs lead to. Simply thinking things through may help, in aggregate, get more students across the finish line.

And as for fixing the disconnect between employers and community colleges? Fuller has some recommendations, chief among them getting more employers involved in designing curriculums and programs to produce the types of workers they need.

“They’ll endlessly kvetch about not being able to find workers, but they never do anything about it,” he says. “They should be communicating a lot better with schools, telling them what they need.”