California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian hosted a Student Media Teleconference with student journalists across the state on Dec. 9, after the last meeting was postponed in March.

Christian and CCC’s Director of Communications and Marketing, Paige Marlatt Dorr, presented information regarding CCC schools’ increased enrollment in the fall semester exceeding the system’s Vision 2030 roadmap goals.

Enrollment 

A line graph illustrating a 9.6% spike in enrollment data across California community colleges, during the Fall 2025 semester, exceeding CCC’s predicted data.

Christian cited that enrollment across California community colleges has risen by 9.6% since the  height of the COVID-19 pandemic and predicts a 4.6% increase by 2026.

“Our enrollments are off the charts. We’re the system that is rebounding the strongest within the higher-ED systems in the nation,” Christian said.

Increased Security Measures

Community colleges across California have reported patterns of financial aid fraud, where scammers will create artificial fraudulent accounts to enroll in community college classes in order to reap the benefits of student aid resources.

Christian explained that CCC is beginning to implement the digital security service ID.me to authenticate students’ identity and keep out potential scammers to protect the money for financial aid recipients. When implemented, students would have to submit a photo of their drivers license or state issued ID  to prove their identity.

“By putting in ID.me we were able to reduce the number [of bots] that flow through the application and [start] enrolling in classes,” Christian said. “We’re using an AI tool to look at patterns of behaviors that are not real, student behaviors, to be able to flag any bad actors that might be using bots.”

Teleconference Scheduling

These teleconferences used to be held four times a year with two in the spring and two in the fall. Like previous semesters the first teleconference is usually in October or November, but according to Dorr, their team was understaffed and had to cancel the first teleconference of this year.

“We tend to offer roughly four student media teleconferences a year, two in the fall and two in the spring,” Dorr said. “We are on track for at least two teleconferences in the spring.”

Dorr and Christian plan to continue with more teleconferences in order to keep student journalists and their readers informed on the CCC system.