The Community College Difference

When Leticia Garcia, Ed.M.’26, was in high school in Petaluma, California, she internalized the narrative that going to a four-year college was out of reach. First-gen at all levels, Garcia lacked guidance on how to think about college, let alone apply. She also knew it was expensive, especially given the money she was making working part-time at the local IHOP. When she placed in the lowest level of math at her high school, she felt even more discouraged. Four-year college-level courses, she worried, were out of reach. 

So when a representative from Santa Rosa Junior College visited her high school, and with dreams of a four-year college fading, she said, why not? 

“Honestly, I did not know what else to do after graduation,” she says. “I felt directionless. I did not even know what a ‘major’ was.” 

That “why not?” turned out to be one of the best decisions made by Garcia, a new graduate in the Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship (ELOE) Program, and one of the big reasons she says she was able to succeed academically. 

“Community college was transformative,” she says. “It gave me the space to explore and ultimately discover sociology, a field that helped me understand both myself and the world around me. During that time, I developed strong academic skills, built confidence, and learned how to navigate college systems.” 

Community college was also transformative for Roxanne Claire Ramos, Ed.M.’26, also an ELOE graduate. As the eldest daughter of Filipino immigrants, she says she understood from an early age that higher education was not simply a personal goal, it was a pathway to opportunity for her entire family. She pushed herself in high school to be a high achiever and deeply involved in activities. Unfortunately, the pushing backfired and by the spring of her senior year, she found herself academically burned out and needing to rethink her college plans. 

“When I was rejected from my dream school, I felt both discouraged and determined. I wasn’t ready to let go of that vision for myself,” she says. With the guidance of a college adviser, Ramos chose to attend two-year Ohlone College in Fremont, California. “She encouraged me to see it not as a setback, but as an opportunity: a chance to rediscover my love of learning, regain my balance, and root myself more deeply in my local community. That decision ultimately became one of the most transformative steps in my educational journey.” 

After Ohlone, Ramos transferred to University of California, Berkeley, the dream school she was initially rejected from, and became a student organizer and advocate for fellow transfer students. 

“I supported recruitment efforts that encouraged community college students to transfer to four-year universities and helped design retention programming for those already navigating the transition,” she says. “At many of these events, students would share, ‘It means so much to see you in these spaces.’ In those moments, I began to understand the power of representation in higher education. I often tell my students that although I didn’t choose community college at first, it has always chosen me. Over time, I learned to measure my worth not by accomplishments or outcomes, but by the dedication, perseverance, and resilience I brought to the process.” 

Lecturer Liya Escalera, Ed.M.’09, co-chair of the Ed School’s Higher Education Concentration, has researched and worked with community college students since 2007 when she got a job as the assistant director of learning communities at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. At the time, she was also working on her master’s in English at nearby Simmons College, with a goal to continue to a Ph.D. program in English. 

Her initial experience at a community college rerouted that path. 

“Immediately after stepping foot onto the Bunker Hill campus for my first interview, I knew this was the place for me,” she says. “It resonated with the experiences that I’ve had as a student, how I grew up, the multilingualism, the diversity, the community-oriented nature of community college, all of it just really spoke to me. I loved it. After I had been at Bunker Hill for about a year, I derailed all my life plans. I decided, ‘This is what I need to be doing.’” 

She started teaching and working full-time at Bunker Hill on a grant project. A couple of years later, she came to the Ed School for another master’s, this time wanting to better understand the community college world, especially how to be a better leader, before getting that Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Boston — not in English, but in education, looking at Hispanic-serving community colleges in New England. Now a lecturer at the Ed School, Escalera teaches a class called Opening Doors: The Future of Community College and Open Access Education and continues her research on culturally sustaining campuses. 

When asked how higher education can better help students succeed, she says the answer isn’t by focusing only on four-year institutions. “Community colleges are the answer,” she says. “I think they’re the key. 

“What has always really frustrated me when we talk about higher education in the United States, we are often talking about higher education spaces that serve very, very few people,” she says. “Over the last 10 years, between 40 and 50% of the total number of people enrolled in college in this country have been in community college, but we don’t spend 40 to 50% of the time talking about that. And we certainly don’t allocate resources to the community college sector in the way that we could if we wanted to prioritize access to higher education and equitable outcomes. I think that an investment in community colleges is the way to really create broad access and broad student success.” 

Escalera says we also need to focus more on student success, not just access, when we talk about community college. 

“When I started working in community college, all we talked about was access,” she says. “What has complicated the idea of access is, do you really have access and what do you have access to if we’re not creating learning environments where students can be successful and achieving equitable student outcomes?” Around 2010, she says the conversation started to shift, with input from national organizations like Achieving the Dream and the Lumina Foundation. “These national community college movement players helped really bring forward this idea that access without equitable outcomes is meaningless. You can open the door, but if you’re just churning people in and out who aren’t then completing those two-year credentials or who are not building the skills they need to be successful at the four-year setting, then it really isn’t access. So yes, I have seen a real shift in the field from access to outcomes.” 

For Garcia, having access to community college was critical to her successful outcome, which included transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she got a bachelor’s in sociology before Harvard. At Santa Rosa, she says, she learned the “hidden curriculum” of higher education, such as how to network and build relationships with professors. Community college also gave her the space to make mistakes. 

“And it nurtured my curiosity, resilience, and ambition,” she says. “I am at Harvard today because of community college. Without that foundation, I would not have dared to dream this big.”