Financial Health at Baccalaureate-Granting Community Colleges in the United States: A Descriptive Exploration

Background: Community colleges remain one of the most underfunded sectors of higher education in the United States, raising concerns about fiscal strain as these institutions continue to “do more with less.” Leveraging newly available data, this study explores the fiscal health of community colleges, including those that “do more” by expanding their missions to include community college baccalaureate (CCB) programs. Research Question: We address the following questions: (1) How do fiscal health metrics vary across institutional characteristics, including CCB- and non-CCB granting status and time? (2) What is the relationship between select fiscal health metrics (i.e., Composite Financial Index [CFI]) and CCB adoption? Research Design: Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we first construct multiple measures of fiscal well-being, including standalone measures (e.g., net position), composite measures (e.g., CFI), and binary indicators of fiscal health. Using descriptive and regression-based techniques, we identify trends in community colleges’ fiscal health over time and examine the relationship between CCB adoption and institutional fiscal well-being. Conclusions: We find that smaller, urban community colleges face more fiscal precarity than their peers, though defining which institutions are “fiscally well” varies greatly across financial metrics, suggesting care should be taken when using these measures. Regarding CCBs, we find no systematic evidence of a significant relationship between institutional financial well-being and CCB adoption. Although CCB adoption may be a costly endeavor, adoptive institutions are not overextending themselves financially in order to address the baccalaureate needs of their communities.