Community College

Executive Summary. Staying Enrolled in CalFresh Helps Community College Students Stay in School

Igor Chirikov
Jesse Rothstein
2026

Nearly half of California community college students report struggling with food insecurity. SNAP food benefits (known as CalFresh in California) can help reduce student hunger. Alleviating hunger among students should lead to improved educational outcomes, but rigorous research on this topic remains scarce. Our recent study (The Impact of Nutrition Assistance on College Student Success) helps to close that gap, using a compelling matching design with...

Short Tenures, Lasting Damage: How the State Center Community College District's Turnover Squandered Fresno City College's Cultural Resources. CSHE Policy Brief Series, Vol 26-1

Loffler, German
2026

Community colleges in California operate in a climate of volatility: financial pressures, shifting administrative priorities, anddeclining enrollmentThese pressures converge most acutely in institutions with specialized cultural resources, where even small administrative decisions can have outsized effectsThe 2024 closure of Fresno City College’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeological Curation Facility illustrates how fragile...

CalFresh Benefits Help Students Succeed in College, New Study Finds

May 4, 2026

Berkeley, May 4, 2026 – Community college students who receive CalFresh during their first year of college are more likely to stay on track academically and return for a second year, according to a new working paper from the California Policy Lab and the Center for Studies in Higher Education.

The research finds that students who maintained CalFresh benefits throughout their first year were more likely to complete a full-time course load (30 or more credits) and more likely to enroll...

Working Paper: The Impact of Nutrition Assistance on College Student Success

Igor Chirikov
Jesse Rothstein
2026

Food insecurity is widespread among college students nationwide and is negatively associated with their academic success, yet little is known about whether nutrition assistance programs can improve student outcomes. We examine the impact of sustained Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation on early academic success among California community college students. We use linked administrative data from all 116 California community colleges, FAFSA records, and monthly SNAP participation data from 2014-2018. Using propensity score weighting, we compare outcomes for SNAP-...

Many California Community College Students Are Eligible For—But Not Receiving— CalFresh Benefits

Hogg, Jennifer
Ayers, Sam
Lacoe, Johanna
Perez, Alan
Rothstein, Jesse
2025
Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. Food benefits delivered through the CalFresh program, California’s version
of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), can reduce hunger by helping students pay for groceries but may not reach all eligible students. To date, higher education systems have lacked good estimates of the ...

Trends in Community College Enrollment and CalFresh Eligibility During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ayers, Sam
Hogg, Jennifer
Lacoe, Johanna
Perez, Alan
Rothstein, Jesse
2025
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the federal government responded by expanding the country’s safety-net programs, including through stimulus payments. There were also significant federal policy changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the largest food assistance program in the United States. Benefit amounts were increased, and eligibility rules were changed to make more people eligible, including by...

Filling the Gap: CalFresh Eligibility Among Universityof California and California Community College Students

Rothstein, Jesse
Lacoe, Johanna
Ayers, Sam
Castellanos, Karla
Dizon-Ross, Elise
Doherty, Anna
Henderson, Jamila
Hogg, Jennifer
Hoover, Sarah
Perez, Alan
Weng, Justine
2024

California Community College and University of California student participation in CalFresh food benefits

Castellanos, Karla
Davis, Charles
Dizon-Ross, Elise
Doherty, Anna
Fu, Samantha
Lacoe, Johanna
Rothstein, Jesse
Saucedo, Monica
2022

Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. CalFresh food benefits, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, can help students in California pay for food, but may not reach all eligible students. CalFresh enrollment rates among students have been difficult to estimate due to incomplete data on California students’ eligibility for and enrollment in the CalFresh...

Resilience and Resistance: The Community College in a Pandemic, by Brian Murphy, CSHE 6.21 (April 2021)

Brian Murphy
2021

All universities and colleges in the United States were deeply and immediately affected by the sudden appearance of Covid-19. Two-year public community colleges suffered the same fate as their university neighbors: the immediate needs were to close up operations, shift instruction to online and distance modalities and keep students engaged and focused when all around them collapsed. But the community colleges suffered under constraints not shared by many of their university neighbors: limited discretionary, little or no funding from endowments to fall back on and students whose limited...