Peja Reed lives in Bristol, about 10 miles from Virginia Highlands Community College. But it usually takes her an hour to get to class in the morning.
Four days a week, she wakes up at 6 a.m. to be ready for the school’s #CollegeExpress bus. Driver Jeb Turner said Reed is always waiting in front of her house when the bus rolls off nearby Interstate 81 and collects her from her street on the north edge of the city around 6:45 a.m. Then Turner picks up a few more students closer to downtown Bristol before heading to campus in Abingdon, about a dozen miles back up I-81.
Reed then has almost two hours on campus before her 9:30 a.m. biology class. “I’ll do my school work,” she said. “But that’s what I was trying to do this morning, and I fell asleep.”
Transportation challenges are common for students at Virginia Highlands, which has an enrollment of about 2,000 students — and a service area of more than 1,000 square miles. Many students live far from the bus stops that serve the region’s commercial core, and even those bus lines have gaps that can make it difficult to get to campus.
That transportation challenge could be the breaking point for some people who are thinking about enrolling in an academic or job-training program at the community college.
Help paying for tuition is plentiful: Beyond federal and state student aid, Virginia also offers free tuition for a variety of job-training programs in an effort to place more workers in growing industries. And high school graduates going directly to community college can often get free tuition thanks to local “last-dollar” programs that pay for what’s left over after federal and state aid are applied.
But free tuition doesn’t mean much if a student can’t get to campus.
The #CollegeExpress is one example of how community colleges are trying to meet the evolving needs of their students in Southwest Virginia, a largely rural corner of the state facing widespread challenges driven by systemic changes in the region’s economy.
And as the population of fresh-out-of-high-school students levels off, community colleges must also figure out how to better serve adult learners who are seeking new skills that can lead to better-paying jobs, and who are dealing with their own financial, transportation or child care barriers.
From handing out grocery gift cards to offering laptops on loan, some campuses are finding ways of providing “wraparound” services to help students not just enroll but also complete their programs, earning degrees or certificates that can boost their earning potential.
Reed would like to study international business economics at East Tennessee State University, an hour over the state line from Bristol, or at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. For now, she’s a first-semester student in the general studies program at Virginia Highlands. If she didn’t have the #CollegeExpress, she’d need to ask her father to fit pickups and dropoffs around his shifts at a gas station.
She doesn’t have her driver’s license yet, but she’s been putting away money from her part-time fast-food job to buy a car in time for the fall 2024 semester. So far, she has $300 saved.
The Virginia Community College System has implemented a systemwide platform to match students with resources to provide for some of their most basic needs. But system leaders acknowledge continued struggles to serve the diverse student body.
One of the few things that unites every community college in the state system is “the significant need for wraparound services for the students they serve,” said Jennifer Gentry, vice president of institutional advancement for the state community college system.
Community colleges as essential education hubs
Virginia’s community college system has come under increased pressure to bolster the state’s economy in recent years, in part to fill jobs left vacant by population declines in the southern and western parts of the state.
In rural parts of Southwest and Southside Virginia, students come from expansive geographic areas that have been transformed by the decline of the coal, tobacco and textile industries. Rural areas have increasingly aging populations, and four-year college students are more likely to leave Virginia than stick around after graduation.
Community colleges in these places must serve a wide array of students with a range of education and career goals. Reasonable costs and open access are part of the draw, whether students plan to transfer to a four-year university or take their credentials earned over a matter of weeks or months into the workforce. The cost per credit hour to attend a community college in Virginia is $155; it costs almost three times that to attend a public four-year college in the state.
Virginia ranks seventh in the nation for educational attainment beyond a high school diploma, according to analysis by the Lumina Foundation. But the affluent Northern Virginia region around Washington, D.C., plays a significant role in that ranking. As you move into rural Southwest and Southside Virginia, the attainment level declines considerably. In Lee County, at the very southwestern tip of the state, only 18% of adults 25 and older have at least an associate degree.
In the 2023 spring semester, Virginia’s community colleges enrolled about 133,000 students in academic and workforce training programs, 70% of them part-time. Fields of study range from commercial truck driving to dental hygiene to music theory.
Financial aid, including federal and state grants, is critical at these 23 schools spanning 40 campuses. Nationwide, about 1 in 3 community college students receive federal Pell grants, reserved for students with the greatest financial need, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. In Virginia, that number jumps to almost half. At some rural community colleges in the state, it’s closer to 60% of students receiving Pell grants.
But while traditional financial aid might cover some or all of tuition and fees, it may not stretch to cover the cost of books, required software or uniforms such as nursing scrubs. Nor does it pay for living expenses such as housing, fuel, food or child care.
The state community college system knows that many of its students are struggling. The system, too, is trying to do more with less.
Funding for community colleges in Virginia pales in comparison to what the state Legislature sends to four-year schools. For fiscal year 2022, Virginia ranked ninth from the bottom for state appropriations per full-time-equivalent student at two-year schools.
“We educate the learners that are the most challenged and therefore need more help accessing these resources. And yet we are funded 57 cents on the dollar for every dollar that goes to a four-year university,” said David Doré, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System. “An investment in our learners is an investment to get people into high-wage jobs that will stimulate the economy.”
The current state funding structure provides limited financial support for wraparound services, leaving it up to individual schools to obtain grants or contributions to cover the costs of such programs.
The majority of community college graduates remain in the commonwealth, Doré said, so “Why would we not be investing more in that?”
Laura Pennington, vice president of institutional advancement at Virginia Highlands, said some schools can better address basic student needs than others.
“It takes money,” she said. “And you’re very often not going to be able to use state money or federal money to address those” basic needs. Foundations and community-based organizations are crucial for continued success of low-income students, she said.
Each school’s philanthropic foundation has an emergency fund for students that’s supplemented by a statewide foundation, the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education.
The state foundation has distributed nearly $13 million to local community college foundations over the last five years to help students with costs related to attending school.
“The niche is to fund where the state doesn’t fund,” said Gentry, vice chancellor of the community college system who also serves as executive director of the foundation. “We try to fill in where students have the greatest needs, and we count on the colleges to identify what those needs are in their local communities.”
The foundation’s major initiatives include financial support for former foster youth attending community college, workforce development in rural areas and services for student parents, along with covering unexpected expenses that can derail a student’s progress.
Virginia Highlands has used money from the state-level foundation and its own philanthropic arm to build its transportation and food assistance programs.
The #CollegeExpress bus started as a carpool matchmaking effort by college staff to help bridge the transportation gap for students who live outside its base in Abingdon. The school’s service area covers two counties and the city of Bristol, for a total population of just under 100,000.
In Virginia, about a third of community college campuses lack a public transit stop within walking distance, according to analysis by the Civic Mapping Initiative of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation, which promotes access to public services.
When Virginia Highlands’ carpool matching became too unwieldy, the school secured a $25,000 grant from the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education and contracted with the local transit agency to provide service for its students.
The #CollegeExpress launched in 2019 with one route to Bristol and just a handful of regular riders; it now has three routes, and 37 students are signed up to ride.
The bus service, which picks up most students within a block or two of their homes, evolves with student needs. Karen Cheers, who runs a program at the college that supports low-income, first-generation college students, said a student recently called her on a Tuesday because she found out she didn’t have a way to get to class the next day.
Cheers coordinated for the bus to add her to a route on Wednesday.
Responding to critical needs
Leigh Ann Adams couldn’t figure out why all the milk was gone.
Adams coordinates the PHIL Station at Virginia Highlands, a food pantry posthumously named after a beloved faculty member. Tucked away in a building that has low foot traffic for privacy, the modest windowless room offers an array of nonperishable options and quick-prep meals.
If anything, Adams said, students are shy about using the food pantry, concerned that it will take away from another who needs it more. But one day during this fall, she said, all two dozen of the small containers of milk she had purchased just a few days earlier vanished from the minifridge. Concerned about possible theft, she asked campus security to check the camera mounted in the corner of the room, to find out if one person had taken the milk, or many.
“That many people had come in,” she said, and had taken all of the milk.
Last spring, Adams restocked the pantry every three weeks. This semester, she says, “I could probably go to the store twice a week, if I had the time and we had the funds to do that.” She said the pantry easily goes through $325 worth of food weekly.
Initial funding for the pantry came from a grant from the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation, which has supported community college food pantries across the state. Now, the college relies on local donations to keep it going. This year, Virginia Highlands raised more than $6,000 on Giving Tuesday to keep the PHIL Station stocked, thanks to a combination of individual contributions and a matching program from the VFCCE and Aetna Better Health of Virginia.
Every community college in Virginia has some sort of food assistance program, though they’re all different in size and scope depending on the college’s resources and partnerships with community organizations. In a survey of more than 10,000 Virginia community college students in fall 2020, 32% said they had faced food insecurity in the previous month.
The PHIL Station was open for only three months before the pandemic forced students off campus. Gift cards to the regional Food City chain of grocery stores were crucial in keeping students fed while the physical pantry was closed, Adams said. She still routinely sends gift cards to students who ask for them, in amounts ranging from $25 to $100.
Inside each envelope, Adams adds a handwritten note wishing the student well in their program, which she looks up and mentions by name. “[I’m] just trying to make them feel like somebody knows them as a person, not just as the kid who needs,” she said.
Sixty miles away from Virginia Highlands in the town of Big Stone Gap, Mountain Empire Community College also has about 2,000 students enrolled each semester. It’s more rural than Virginia Highlands, serving a mountainous three-county area that stretches more than 90 miles from its most northern point to the southwestern-most tip of Virginia.
The food pantry at Mountain Empire has been open since 2013, driven by a rise in student requests for emergency aid to pay for groceries. The college’s philanthropic foundation helps fill the shelves with nonperishable and toiletry items that line three sides of a wide room. Two refrigerators are packed with frozen items and microwaveable meals.
Dean of Students Lelia Bradshaw recalls being able to fill the pantry at the beginning of a semester and having the supplies last almost until final exams. But now the food pantry needs a monthly restock. Some students will fill a bag with groceries to take home, while others pop in to microwave a hot lunch.
The school’s laptop loan program was also prompted by a critical need.
Campus staff noticed that many students starting at the college had Chromebook laptops that they’d used in high school. But many fields of study require a computer that’s more powerful to run specialized software. The college ordered a few laptops in 2019 and started lending them out. “And then COVID hit, and everybody needed a computer” to complete classes online, said Bradshaw. “So we ordered a big round [of them].”
Mountain Empire began the fall 2023 semester with about 80 loaner laptops but ran out within the first few days. So the school ordered 50 more. Anyone who’s enrolled and taking at least six credits a semester (or an equivalent for shorter career and technical programs) can borrow a laptop, charger and carrying case, thanks to a combination of funding over the years that has included COVID federal relief money, Virginia Department of Social Services funds, and other similar sources totaling about $60,000.
Mountain Empire also has graphing calculators available for loan for students who can’t afford to buy the devices, which cost about $150.
Emergency funds meet unexpected needs
Beyond everyday basic needs, emergency expenses can trip up students and prevent them from completing their classes. Nationwide, about 70% of all colleges and universities offer some type of emergency fund to help students stay enrolled despite unexpected costs.
At Virginia Highlands and Mountain Empire, students can request help with financial emergencies, with funding coming from each school’s philanthropic foundation.
There’s often a gap left after federal and state funding are applied to a student account, said Pennington at Virginia Highlands. “Even though I think students are grateful for what they get for tuition [aid], there’s never enough for books and access codes” for online tools and software, she said.
Pennington has purchased quarts of oil for a student’s car to hold them over until they could get repairs done. She used the emergency fund to pay for hotel nights to help a student get out of an unsafe housing situation.
In October, she helped two students in a practical nursing program who each needed to buy $790 worth of books and software for the year. She was able to give $500 to each.
For many students, she said, one modest financial crisis can wreak major havoc on their lives.
“And many of them don’t have families who have a long history of college attendance, and a lot of them don’t have a real deep bench in terms of support at home,” Pennington said.
At Mountain Empire, students fill out an online form to request emergency aid; the help is capped at $700 per semester and $1,400 during their tenure at the school. The MECC Foundation provides about $20,000 annually to fill student requests. Bradshaw said money for vehicle repairs and gasoline is often requested, as many students drive more than 30 minutes to attend class.
A challenge: Measuring return on investment
Community colleges often measure the success of these emergency funds and basic needs initiatives in terms of program completion: the rate of students who go on to graduate or earn a credential.
Measuring workforce success is more difficult, as there’s a delay in the data for the employment rate of community college graduates. The most recent year of Virginia data, from 2020, found that almost 80% of career and technical students were employed 18 months after graduating from community college. The rate is comparable to the outcome for the classes of 2018 and 2019, but it will be several years before the true picture of pandemic and post-pandemic outcomes crystalizes.
Having multiple strategies working in tandem to help students can amplify their impact.
A 2023 study looked at four Arkansas community colleges that converted their food assistance efforts from simple pantries into holistic hubs for basic student needs, providing connections to public assistance programs, financial and career advising and life skills training. Students who used the hubs were up to 8 percentage points more likely to reenroll the following semester and the following academic year, and to ultimately earn their credential.
The education journey for community college students can be far from linear, with completion sometimes taking far longer than the typical standards for measuring student success.
Bradshaw of Mountain Empire said that “life issues” can easily take students away from campus. Sometimes they’ll attend for a semester, take the next one off to focus on work or family obligations, then return in the summer. The ultimate win, in many cases, is when students remain enrolled despite a financial hardship — when they come back semester after semester for however long it takes to finish their degree or credential.
“It’s like a revolving door,” she said. “We have a lot of students who live in a multigenerational household. So you’ve got parents and grandparents and nieces. … We see a lot of that, and … [sometimes] school just falls by the wayside.”
While enrollment remains fairly flat across the state’s community college system after years of gradual decline, program completions and degrees have increased. The increases are notable at both Mountain Empire and Virginia Highlands. In the 2017-18 school year, Virginia Highlands awarded 548 degrees and certificates. In 2021-22, that had risen to 705. Over the same period, Mountain Empire jumped from 650 to 975.
Bradshaw said a recent focus on short-term programs can help prospective students anticipate challenges and plan for them. An eight- or 10-week program to earn a technical certification may not be students’ ultimate career goal, but they can take that certification into the workforce immediately and start to see the benefits while planning their next steps.
Students have Single Stop for help
In 2021, VCCS launched the Single Stop platform at all 23 of its community colleges. The program, operated by a national nonprofit, allows students to input basic information about their household and income and learn if they’re eligible for SNAP (often referred to as food stamps), housing assistance or other social benefit programs.
Becky Kell, who manages Single Stop for Virginia Highlands, said food assistance and health insurance access are common benefits for students. But Single Stop also can connect users with tax preparation help, affordable internet service and utility assistance programs.
The platform has been especially helpful, she said, for students who may not be eligible for benefit programs but can get connected to local resources for help. Kell said most Single Stop users at Virginia Highlands are in their 20s or 30s and are often the heads of their household.
Since VCCS rolled out Single Stop across its system in spring 2021, more than 45,000 students have used it, accessing more than $35 million in social service benefits across the state, said Jim Babb, communications manager at VCCS.
Single Stop helps track the number of people who receive assistance and the value of ongoing aid, but it’s sometimes hard to get students to complete a profile to see what their options are — it’s just one more form for them to remember to fill out. Mountain Empire has offered grocery store gift cards to students who complete a Single Stop profile. At Virginia Highlands, students are asked to fill out a profile before they can request a second grocery or gas gift card.
But Single Stop can’t solve all the social infrastructure challenges facing students.
Child care still a barrier for many
One of the biggest barriers to signing up for and completing an education or training program at the state’s community colleges is child care, which is an increasingly critical area of focus for school leaders.
Even if students can afford child care, it’s often hard to find a reliable source. Nearly half of Virginians live in a child-care desert, according to research from the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, meaning there’s a severe shortage of child care providers.
Mountain Empire President Kris Westover has been talking to United Way and Head Start in the region to discuss options for offering child care on campus. “It’s probably one of the biggest barriers to our students being able to come and be successful right now, is child care,” she said.
Doré, who became chancellor of the state community college system less than a year ago, said the need for child care for student parents struck him during his initial tour of the system. A handful of campuses have or are about to open child care centers, but they’re usually operated separately from the community college, which typically don’t have the means to do so independently.
“The most effective approach … is if we can provide the space at one of our colleges and then partner with a community based organization to offer the childcare services,” Doré said.
“We just don’t have a lot of options,” Bradshaw said of the area surrounding Mountain Empire.
Sometimes students bring their kids to school with them, which the faculty has supported. A few years ago, the only way the school could field a nursing aide course was to use grant money to offer child-minding, which let parents drop their children off at the campus gym before going to night classes.
The school plans to restart that program in 2024.
This reporting is part of a collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News‘ Rural News Network, and the Cardinal News, KOSU, Mississippi Today, Shasta Scout and The Texas Tribune. Support from Ascendium made the project possible.