History and Growth of Community College Bachelor’s Degrees (CCBs)

With little fanfare, states began authorizing community colleges to confer baccalaureate degrees over three decades ago. West Virginia was the first state to authorize an associate-dominant institution to award both associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.¹ By 2021, one or more associate-dominant institutions, more commonly called community colleges, were approved to confer baccalaureate degrees in 24 states.² Among these, Florida and Washington State are recognized as having scaled up baccalaureate degrees to all or nearly all of their associates-dominant colleges.³

CCBs are awarded by community and technical colleges that have historically conferred associate degrees as their highest credential. CCB-conferring colleges remain associate-dominant but have added the bachelor’s degrees to their portfolio of degrees offered. While CCB degrees can be offered in a wide range of fields, they are typically focused on programs of study that are critical to local and regional economies where community college students live and work.⁴ CCBs explicitly seek to transform career technical education (CTE) designed to terminate in non-degree program certificates and associate degrees into baccalaureate pathways and provide a path to the baccalaureate in programs of study that have not prioritized transfer in the past.⁵ To resolve inequities, CCB programs offer a solution to complement and bolster transfer and improve postsecondary attainment nationwide.

One of the first studies to be published in 2009 on CCBs by Barbara Townsend and her colleagues Debra Bragg and Collin Ruud noted CCB programs tend to be built on curricula considered “terminal” by the higher education systems.⁶ Terminal education refers to occupationally focused programs whose goal is to exit graduates to employment rather than transfer them to universities. In focusing on employment, terminal programs often omit coursework that enables students to transfer on track to attain a baccalaureate without substantial loss of credit and increased cost.

In a study of terminal education in North Carolina, Mark D’Amico, Cameron Sublett, and James Bartlett II noted a higher percentage of these students come from economically distressed counties than traditional transfer students do. They observed the transfer of terminal education students is “an issue of equity and social and economic mobility” in that state (and likely in others) and that transfer and articulation agreements do not adequately address the continuing education of “terminal” degree holders.⁷ Given the likelihood these students are more demographically diverse than students enrolling in traditional transfer programs, failure to provide pathways to baccalaureate attainment is problematic to improving equity in higher education.

Yet another factor contributing to CCB policy adoption is cost. In their 2019 report updating the national landscape for CCB degrees, Deborah Floyd and Michael Skolnik cited research gathered from community college leaders who argued CCBs are not only more affordable, but also more geographically accessible and conveniently delivered to working adults.⁸ Research by Debra Bragg and Maria Claudia Soler and Lia Wetzstein, Elizabeth Meza, and Debra Bragg that showed working adults are a primary audience for CCB degrees because they enable students to continue working while paying lower tuition and fees in pursuit of the baccalaureate.⁹ By offering programs close to home and work, students can continue working and do not have to defer income that comes with attending college in close enough proximity to work to retain employment. Interviews with working students pursuing CCB degrees to advance in their current careers also revealed leaving employment—often full-time jobs—was antithetical to achieving their goal of baccalaureate attainment, many had to work to pay for school and meet the needs of themselves and their dependents.¹⁰

Finally, these degrees help a state to increase bachelor’s degree production and expand the workforce mission of community and technical colleges.¹¹ The most common CCB programs are in high-demand areas such as business, education, and health professions.¹² By serving a new population of students in these high-need areas at the bachelor’s level, the degrees can increase educational pathways for professional and technical associate graduates who have faced barriers to applying credits toward a bachelor's degree.

In recent testimony in Washington State, Sheila Edwards-Lange, president of Seattle Central College, said, “almost 600 students a year enroll in our programming courses. These students intend to transfer and continue in computer science, but what we hear from them is that the programs they want to transfer to are constrained and hard to get into.” But, she said, “many end up transferring in other fields. That is a loss for them and the companies that want to hire them.”¹³ Community colleges that offer bachelor’s programs to welcome students like those at Seattle Central support their career development in the communities they call home.