Report: Increasing Numbers of Community Colleges are Offering Bachelor’s Degrees

Diverse Education

May 7, 2024

More community colleges in the U.S. are beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees in addition to their usual offerings, and many of them serve minority populations, according to a recent report from The Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA) and higher ed consulting firm Bragg & Associates Inc.

According to the report, a CCB college is defined as a school that presently or historically confers mostly sub-baccalaureate degrees – such as associate degrees – and confers less than 50% of their total degrees at the baccalaureate level. The report also looks at only publicly funded and regionally accredited community colleges.

As of last December, there are 187 community colleges that meet the requirements of being a CCB college in the nation.

West Virginia was the first state to have one in 1989. By the 2010s, several more states – including California, Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Georgia – had authorized varying numbers of their colleges to confer bachelor’s degrees as well.

In the case of Florida, all 28 of the colleges in its system began conferring bachelor’s degrees as of 2021, according to the report. Delaware and Nevada join Florida in this full-scale adoption of CCB degrees.

The number of CCB colleges has seen significant growth, even compared to just two years ago in Fall 2021. Back then, there were 132, but now, there has been a 32% increase in how many community colleges confer, or are authorized to confer, bachelor’s degrees.

This means that, out of the 932 community colleges in the nation, a fifth of them are CCB colleges, the report noted.

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