05/31/2026
‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-31/why-california-community-college-students-struggle-with-online-classes
A close-up shot of a woman wearing a black dress working on a laptop on a small table next to the window of a restaurant.
A woman works on a laptop in a restaurant.
By Adam Echelman
CalMatters
May 31, 2026 3 AM PT
California’s vast community college system has embraced online classes, now about 40% of offerings, leaving campuses noticeably emptier even as remote courses become a lifeline for working adults and parents.
Students and instructors describe a trade-off: Online courses expand access but often feel lonely, less rigorous and easy to game, with prerecorded lectures, recycled assignments, AI tools and even bots undermining real learning.
Colleges are investing in training and virtual support, yet counseling backlogs, large asynchronous classes and uneven teaching leave many students struggling, while some faculty warn entire subjects like foreign languages are being hollowed out online.
California’s community colleges represent the largest higher education system in the country — more than 2 million students, or 60 times the undergraduate population of UC Berkeley. But walking around a community college campus, it’s often hard to tell.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, cafeterias and local coffee shops are quieter, fewer students are sitting on the quad and, with less foot traffic, the grass is lush. Even after campuses returned to in-person classes, many students are still working from their dining room table: About 40% of all community college classes are online, according to Melissa Villarin, a spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.
The state’s community colleges are funded based largely on the number of students they enroll, and since students prefer online courses, there’s an incentive for schools to expand them.
Ask students or professors about the merits of online education, and they’ll often say it’s more accessible, especially for students who have kids or are working a full-time job. The same argument is often true at the University of California and California State University campuses, which offer considerably more online courses than before the pandemic, though far fewer than the community colleges.
Ask students or professors about the problems of online education, and they’ll point to any number of familiar complaints: a lack of engagement, a sense of loneliness, impersonal lectures, and the temptation to move the Zoom window aside and click on something else.
In online classrooms where the majority of students keep their cameras off, bots and scammers have become a systemwide problem: They use AI and other algorithms to mimic real students, submit assignments and steal financial aid. Even real students are using AI to submit online assignments, while teachers are using it to grade.
Researchers say it’s hard to know how the quality of online education compares to in-person courses because it’s subjective and because of the wide diversity of courses and teaching methods.
In Lupe Archundia’s microeconomics class at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, all the lectures were pre-recorded, in some cases more than a decade ago. The professor gives students the answers to the quizzes — before they take the test — and all the quizzes are in a multiple-choice format that a computer grades.
“I am a 39-year-old woman,” Archundia said. “It’s not like I just finished high school and I want easy test answers.”
Archundia has two kids and a full-time job as a secretary, so she studies in the evenings, turning her dining room table into a standing desk with the help of a few cardboard boxes. She wants a bachelor’s degree to help her move up in her career.
In the beginning of the course, she said she would study for three hours before completing each quiz, but once she discovered the professor had made the answers available, she started cutting corners. She said there are still certain concepts, such as elasticity, that she doesn’t fully understand, even though she aced the online exam.
She feels conflicted about it. “I’m responsible, too,” she said.
What the research does — or doesn’t — say
The research into online education is generally inconclusive. One 2025 study found that students consistently perform worse in online classes than in-person ones, though the gap is decreasing. Online courses also make it easier for students to hold a job while in school and complete their degree in the long term, said Di Xu, a professor at UC Irvine’s School of Education.
When asked about students’ concerns with online education, Alex Breitler, a spokesperson for Delta College, said these classes expand “access to higher education for working adults, parents, caregivers and other students balancing significant responsibilities,” including many students who “simply would not be able to pursue college without online options.”
A person wearing a blue shirt and glasses works on a laptop at a kitchen table, with books and school materials scattered.
Tina Rocha sorts through her classwork at her home in Stockton on May 7. Rocha is a student at San Joaquin Delta College, where many of her classes are online. (Larry Valenzuela / CalMatters)
Delta is not alone — the idea that online courses increase access is a common refrain among college officials. Xu pointed to one empirical study of an online master’s program at Georgia Tech that proved this point, though the students are very different from those at California’s community colleges, where many are seeking short-term career training or an associate degree.
What researchers do know is that online education has inherent challenges. It requires “self-directed learning skills,” including a “very high level of self-time management,” said Xu. “In an in-person environment, interaction happens naturally,” she said. “But in an online environment, especially asynchronous, that opportunity needs to be embedded. Otherwise, the student will feel very lonely.”
The majority of online classes at California’s community colleges are asynchronous, meaning that the content is all pre-recorded and students can study at their own convenience. Students prefer asynchronous classes too, even compared to online courses where the instructor is live, according to a survey by the RP Group, an education research nonprofit.
Archundia said she always opts for in-person classes but there are few available, especially for the English classes she wants to take and during the evening hours that she’s available. Her dream is to become a writer, and she wants to switch her major to English, instead of her current major, business administration, though she isn’t sure what classes are necessary to make that happen.
In April, when she reached out to a college counselor for help selecting classes, the next available appointment was about three weeks later. Archundia still hasn’t been able to find an appointment that works with her work schedule.
A close-up shot of a person's hand pointing toward a laptop screen displaying an email on a small table in a restaurant.
Lupe Archundia shows an email exchange with the San Joaquin Delta College counseling office on her laptop at a Panera Bread in Stockton on May 7. (Larry Valenzuela / CalMatters)
One-on-one advising and support structures, such as guidance counselors, are essential for online students, said Rebecca Ruan-O’Shaughnessy, the director of program and strategy at College Futures Foundation and a former executive at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office — but schools also need to adapt.
Online courses are fundamentally different, and schools need to redesign their courses, not just retrofit them, she said. She pointed to some programs that have new and promising approaches to online education, such as shortening the length of the class or trying to integrate adults’ work experience given so many online students have a full-time job.
“That is the difficult part for community colleges and other institutions,” Ruan-O’Shaughnessy said. “Frankly, they don’t have the incentive to do that level of work, because that’s a lot of work.”
Breitler, with Delta College, acknowledged that counseling appointments are often booked “weeks in advance” because of high demand. He said the college is trying new solutions, such as letting students submit questions to counselors online and creating drop-in hours where an appointment isn’t needed.
Remedial education in foreign languages
Cyndi Cunningham enrolled at Palomar College in San Marcos, on the northern edge of San Diego County, in 2022, after the pandemic forced her local shopping mall to close temporarily, making her longtime retail job suddenly seem precarious. Starting college for the first time, she was taking general education and introductory courses, mostly online, and struggled to pay attention and manage her time. “I only ended up taking one class in person per semester — not because I didn’t want to take in-person classes — but because I couldn’t find them,” she said. “I felt like I wasn’t learning; I was just kind of doing tasks.”
She saw professors cutting corners too: Two of her classes in Chicano studies were taught by the same professor and she once noticed he was using the exact same lecture in both classes.
Cunningham has since transferred from community college to Cal State San Marcos, where she’s majoring in ethnic studies and plans to become a high school teacher. “Even engaging with other students is so much different in person than on a discussion board,” she said. “I realized more how much of a disservice the online classes did.”
To an extent, online classes can save costs for colleges because they don’t require a physical space and they can enroll many more students, said Xu. But she said adding support systems — such as specialized counseling for students or professional development for faculty — can create additional expenses.
Online education “has the potential to save a lot of cost,” she said, but only if colleges are “willing to sacrifice a lot of the quality elements that are important for students.”
Foreign language courses are particularly costly for universities, said Julia Simon, a professor of French at UC Davis and the chair of a task force on languages for the university. Language courses are typically small, meet regularly, and many less popular languages enroll only a handful of students. Facing a structural budget deficit, the university recently asked her task force to develop a plan for slashing courses in the event of cuts.
Meanwhile, she said both the nearby community colleges and the UC system are expanding online foreign language classes, which can operate at a larger scale. Sacramento City College, for instance, is offering four French classes in fall 2026 — all of them are online and fully asynchronous.
“It’s an enormous problem,” she said. In her view, the students who take online courses lack the same opportunities to practice their speaking and miss out on vital cultural lessons that don’t fit in a strict language-learning curriculum. Once they enter UC Davis, they’re unprepared, she said. “We can’t make them repeat courses they’ve already had.”
She said she’s considering creating a set of conversation classes that would amount to remedial education.
‘It all depends on the professor’
California legislators and education officials have poured millions into improving online education since the pandemic and have introduced new rules meant to encourage more interaction between faculty and students. All across the state, faculty routinely train on ways to improve their online instruction, and colleges have hired staff members to help with online course design and scheduling.
But the 2024 survey by the RP Group found that among faculty who had taught at least one online course, the majority still preferred in-person instruction.
A view of a whiteboard with a schedule written on it in various colors of marker hanging on the wall of an entryway of a house.
A close-up shot of a person wearing a blue shirt and glasses working on a laptop on a kitchen table inside a house. In the foreground, out of focus, is the back of the laptop with decorative stickers and a colorful glass of water as the person types on the keyboard.
Tina Rocha’s creative writing professor at San Joaquin Delta College recently took a sabbatical, learning how to improve teaching for people with learning disabilities. It paid off, said Rocha, who is 55 and started college in 2024 after recovering from three back-to-back strokes in 2020. Because of her disability, she occasionally needs reminders from the instructor to submit assignments. Sometimes she asks for accommodations to avoid certain noises or lights that distort her vision and make her twitch, she said, but her professor is understanding and accommodating. Online education can be a “wonderful alternative,” she said.
Rocha studies every night at her dining room table, which is often scattered with her notebooks. A calendar hangs from her wall, with notes covering every corner of white space, and a white board sits at the entrance to her home, listing out in color-coded lines each of the week’s responsibilities.
“It all depends on the professor,” she said. Her online film class this semester has been much worse than her creative writing course, she said. The film professor has a lava lamp in the background that reflects psychedelic patterns on the ceiling. When Rocha asked him to turn it off, he said he tried but was unable to, without offering an explanation. Now, to prevent symptoms, she places a sticky note on the screen whenever the professor starts talking.
Rocha said she tried to switch to an in-person film class but was too late. Only online classes were available.
‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education
About 40% of California’s community college courses are online now, redefining education. These courses are more accessible, college officials say, but they come with serious drawbacks.
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