Transportation Equity for California Community Colleges

Executive Summary

For my leadership project, I focused on addressing affordable transportation needs for community college students in California. This project builds on the recent report conducted by the Community College League of California’s Affordability, Food & Housing Access taskforce. The report found that community college students spend more money on transportation than students at both public and private four-year colleges. Lack of affordable housing and student’s struggles to balance both work and school demands contribute to this disparity. A mixed-method research study of Latino students who enrolled but did not complete college programs emphasized the significant relationship transportation has in dictating whether the student can successfully attend school while also managing other responsibilities. Three key components leading to this significantly high transportation cost are reliable access to a car, quality public transit, and high parking costs. We inventoried the transportation services, programs, and costs at 115 of the 116 California community colleges as advertised on each campus’ website. We found that most community colleges offer some form of parking or public transit student subsidies but little else. Due to the state education code, parking costs were similar across campuses. In contrast, transit pass costs varied from $0 to more than $100 per semester. On average, students paid more for transit passes than for parking permits. We believe that community colleges, with the support of the State, have opportunities to better support students’ transportation needs to ensure that transportation access is not a barrier to educational outcomes.

Importance
I think this project is important because it relates to not only access and mobility for those without (equity), but also sustainable modes of transportation and economics of transportation partnerships. Little research has been done discussing transportation accessibility and costs for community college students, so this research brought attention to a group which has largely been ignored. By shedding light on the barriers community college students currently face, we can encourage policies and partnerships to address and remedy these challenges. I chose this project because, as a current student at a university with high costs of living and high parking costs, this project cuts close to home. I’ve personally struggled with managing life, school, and expenses and I think it really contributes to student’s overall well-being, which is often sacrificed for the sake of school and expenses.

Impact and Reach
The goal of this project was to create a succinct, complete, and quality dataset of California community college’s transportation access programs. Completion and utility of this dataset is one metric to measure the project’s success in meeting objectives, which we successfully accomplished. The second goal was to analyze the dataset to determine the type of relationship between different transportation programs and their impact on students. We successfully analyzed the data we collected and generated a published report of our findings. Lastly, this report was submitted to members of the legislature in June, 2022. Our ultimate goal, our ideal outcome, is for our brief to inform members of the state legislature on the gaps of community college access to affordable transportation and lead to policy changes to ensure our community college students do not endure more challenges because of lack of affordable transportation.

Collaboration
I worked with Adam Cohen and Madeline Brozen who were the two project managers. I also worked with my fellow grad student Rasik Hussain. This project fell under the larger UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. Our client of sorts was the Community College League of California. They are a nonprofit public benefit corporation who supports community college leaders and communities by advocating for their behalf on federal and state levels. I demonstrated leadership by communicating effectively, listening intently and having a positive attitude. I had never done research with an official university institution before this project and it was a great learning experience.

My Role Well Defined
I was responsible for completing half of the community college transportation policy/costs inventory, analyzing the data and then created charts and tables for the statistical analyses which were published in the report. I led the analysis, cleaning, and data management portion of the project independently and generated the charts and tables by myself except for requests and feedback from our project lead. I was able to join our table with demographic data such as the land use designation of the community college (rural, suburban, urban), population data and other sociodemographic data. The final deliverable, our report, was submitted to members of the California legislature to inform them of the gaps community college students face in access to affordable transportation.

Optional Next Steps
While I do not intend to continue this work explicitly, I do plan to work as an active transportation planner in my career which expands mobility and access for all groups including community college students.