For generations, California’s community colleges have been a huge part of the legacy of higher education success that has helped define our state.

Conveniently located, affordable to all, providing technical and continuing education courses as well as pure academics, they also have long been a go-between venue for those who want or need to go to college locally before transferring to California public and private universities.

All California schools were highly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown times, classes everywhere became online rather than in-person.

But with restrictions lifted, regular classroom instruction has returned to something resembling normal from kindergartens through graduate schools in the state. The University of California campuses are back at full enrollment, with hundreds of thousands of potential students from around the world clamoring to gain acceptance.

At the crucial community college level, not so much. Enrollment there is down, dramatically so, around the state. At Pasadena City College, for instance, along with Santa Monica College always one of the top two schools for transfers into the UC system, 25,423 students were enrolled in 2020, 23,087 were enrolled in 2021, while here in 2022, only 18,215 students have enrolled, as the news site Pasadena Now reported.

The reasons are complex and still not entirely understood, campus officials report. But one factor is certainly fully understood — pandemic immigration restrictions kept thousands of foreign students out of the country, and clearly few of them wanted to, or were allowed to, stay enrolled in a system of purely online instruction.

National statistics show that community college enrollment was down 13% from 2019 to 2021.

And visits to community college campuses show that in many cases those who are enrolled are still using distance learning.

“On a recent Monday, Merritt College, high up in the Oakland hills, the main parking lot, in front of the state-of-the-art Barbara Lee Science and Allied Health building, was almost empty,” reports Louis Freedberg of the EdSource website. “The library, which is only open Tuesday through Thursday, was shuttered with a large roll-up security grille, an unnerving sight on any college campus.”

A commenter named Kim responded to his story: “Some of the Fall 2022 classes at the community college I am attending only offer online and hybrid, and those were science classes I am talking about. Some don’t offer in person at all!”

“I work in a community college library,” writes commenter T.L. The majority of students I’ve talked to want to be back on campus. We want them back as well. We believe that enrollments will rise once students are allowed back on campus full-time. Our biggest problem is that faculty don’t want to come back to campus at all.”

Just as Zoom meetings and the like will be an efficient option for work and organizations going forward, pandemic or no pandemic, they can never fully replace the need for people to be face to face. “A pre-pandemic study at the California Community Colleges showed that students who took courses online were less likely to complete them, or got poorer grades, compared with students who took exactly the same classes in-person,” Freedberg reports. If faculty don’t want to be on campus — well, as we always hear, there are a lot of underemployed Ph.D.s out there who do.