Community Colleges Need to Credential the Future, Not Just Educate for It

By Francis Pollara

When I decided to run for my local community-college board, I assumed I'd spend most of my time on budgets, facilities, and student services.

Instead, I found myself asking a more basic question: What exactly are we preparing students for?

That question is getting harder to answer, and not because anyone at the college is being careless. The relationship between education and work is changing faster than the institutions built to manage it. AI is reshaping which jobs exist. Employers say they can't find people with the technical skills they need, even as new occupations appear faster than degree programs can be redesigned to match them. And for students, the old promise — that a college degree is the universal ticket to economic security — has gotten a lot more complicated.

Community colleges sit at the center of this, whether they've chosen to or not. They serve students at nearly every stage of life: recent high-school graduates, working adults, career changers, veterans, parents going back to school, students on their way to a four-year transfer. No other kind of institution touches that many entry points into the economy at once.

But sitting at the center of the transition isn't the same as being built for it. To do this well, community colleges need to change how they think about what they're actually credentialing students to do.

A degree still matters, and so does the broad education that comes with earning one. But a degree can't be the only currency we offer. Students should be able to accumulate portable, recognizable credentials that say something specific about what they know and can do — an associate degree, yes, but also an industry certification, a short-term technical credential, or a sequence of courses that adds up to demonstrated competency in data analysis, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, health care, or whatever field is hiring this year instead of ten years ago. The goal isn't to turn community colleges into trade schools. It's to make the connection between learning and opportunity visible, instead of leaving students to discover — often the hard way — whether their credits actually added up to anything.

Dual enrollment is a small, concrete version of what this could look like. At Pasadena City College, high-school students take college courses for both high-school and college credit, through a program that includes career exploration and pathway courses leading to technical certificates. That's not just an early taste of college life. Done right, it's the first link in a chain: high school to credential, credential to internship or apprenticeship, apprenticeship to career — or onward to a four-year degree. We tend to talk about these as competing tracks. They're not. They're pieces of the same system, and students shouldn't have to guess which piece they're standing on.

I come to this from an unusual angle for a community-college board member. I've spent most of my career around entrepreneurship, technology, product development, and transportation innovation — working with companies trying to figure out what skills the economy will actually need next. One thing has stuck with me from that world: employers don't hire degrees. They hire people who can do things. Education has to bridge those two realities, and right now the bridge is often missing.

That gap is only getting more urgent with AI. The campus conversation about AI tends to circle around whether students are using ChatGPT to write papers and whether professors can catch them. Those are real questions, but they're not the important ones. The important question is whether our graduates will know how to work with increasingly capable machines — which takes more than learning a tool. It takes judgment, communication, technical literacy, and the ability to understand a problem well enough to know what to ask a machine to do with it. Few curricula are built for that yet, and the ones that are weren't built quickly.

Community colleges are actually well positioned to move fast here, precisely because they sit close to both students and employers. They can build shorter pathways, partner directly with industry, and revise programs at a pace four-year institutions structurally can't match. But moving fast only helps if we're willing to ask hard questions about outcomes: Did the student earn the credential? Did it lead to a job, a better job, an apprenticeship, a transfer? Did the program teach the skills employers actually need, at a cost that was worth it? These aren't questions asked in hostility to education. They're the questions we owe students who can't afford to spend years accumulating credits with no clear destination.

None of this means every program should become narrowly vocational. A good college should still teach history, literature, science, and philosophy — students need to reason, communicate, and exercise judgment in a world that increasingly rewards exactly those capabilities. But we shouldn't force students to choose between a meaningful education and a meaningful credential. We can build both into the same pathway, if we design it on purpose instead of by accident.

The next decade of higher education won't be defined by how many Americans go to college. It will be defined by whether our institutions build pathways flexible enough to stay valuable as the economy keeps changing under everyone's feet. I think community colleges may turn out to be the most important institutions in American higher education for exactly that reason — they're where a student can discover a career, earn a credential, learn a trade, work alongside new technology, change careers at 35, or lay the foundation for a bachelor's degree, all without pretending those are separate systems.

If we build those pathways well, community colleges stop competing with universities, apprenticeships, and employers, and start connecting them. That may be the most valuable credential we can hand a student: not proof that they went to college, but a clear, legible path to where they can go next.

Francis Pollara is a trustee of the Pasadena Area Community College District, which governs Pasadena City College. More of his writing is available at francispollara.com.

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