Working full time, raising a family and returning after several years are some of the challenges older students face when going back to school. A lot of community college students come straight out of high school, but others return after 5-20 years of not being in school.
Accounting major Nancy Cervantes, 26, took a five year break from being at school and recently returned in the Fall. She said returning has been very difficult.
“The biggest struggle I would say is knowing where to start, who to talk to and finding help to finding the right path to finishing your education,” Cervantes said.
Though Citrus College pertains to a younger demographic, situating at 72% of students being 24 or younger, 27% of students are older than 25. As a state, 42.3% of community college students are 25 years or older, according to the Chancellor’s Fact Book.
With 2.3 million people in California enrolled at a community college and 42.3% of them who did not immediately graduate from high school, the question arises of how to get students, younger and older, transferred out of community colleges quicker.
Bill AB 705 was established to redesign the Math and English courses to dismantle prerequisite classes and implement them into the other Math and English courses as support classes. The idea is to implement these support classes to get students transferred quicker.
Director of Institutional Research Lan Hao said Citrus College makes decisions based upon the majority of the demographic.
“A college does not have indefinite resources,” Hao said. “There are priorities so sometimes we have to make very hard decisions and AB 705 has been very successful in terms of helping students move along.”
Dean of Math and Business Michael Wangler said rather than a placement exam, students are placed based on the courses and grades they received in high school. He said students who are older have the opportunity to provide their high school records, but are not limited to the transfer level courses without it.
“No matter their background, no matter years they have been out of college, they get to place at a transfer level just like any other student would,” Wangler said.
Wangler said if students take a placement exam after several years of not being in school, it would be a disservice to them, which is why the support classes from AB 705 are implemented.
“Whether you’re coming out of high school or coming back for the first time in 15 years, what we’ve set up here allows for students in those situations to go straight into transfer and go beyond that if they wanted to,” Wangler said.
Support classes have also been embedded for English Courses. Priscilla Carrillo, a learning facilitator at the Writing Center at Citrus said older students struggle with writing.
“They struggle when they come into the Tutoring Center because they go straight into argumentative writing and critical essays,” Carrillo said. “We can definitely see it affecting them.”
Despite the courses provided, sometimes just being a student is hard. STEM Center coordinator Cristian Farias said sometimes it’s not the class itself, but prioritizing being a student again after several years. Farias is in charge of the STEM Center on campus; the center provides tutoring for STEM classes on campus.
He said professors are trying to change the mindset of students because it prevents them from learning when they believe they cannot learn.
“Most of the time they go into a classroom, they don’t believe they can do it and they just keep that mentality throughout the whole class, and they don’t do good because of that mentality,” Farias said. “At the end they kind of reinforce that’s true because of the grade they are getting.”
Even with bills like AB 705, Citrus College provides resources for students younger and older, with programs like the STEM Center and the Learning Center, embedded tutors and counselors on campus.
Students coming straight out of high school and people returning after several years have the same access to resources.
“I don’t see any difference really between our returning students and students coming straight out of high school,” Wangler said. “They all have the same opportunity.”
