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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.”

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.

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. 

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.

Communities living with one of the most severe pollution problems in California could see immediate relief if San Diego leaders can get a key Tijuana River project out of the gate. 

While millions of gallons of untreated sewage enter the river on a regular basis, one road crossing, known as the Saturn Boulevard hot spot, is the source of most airborne pollution from the river. 

As the U.S. and Mexico pursue a combined $800 million in upgrades to wastewater facilities on both sides of the border, local governments are working on a smaller fix to that chokepoint that could improve conditions as soon as next year, officials said.

San Diego leaders are trying to secure about $25 million to repair the road crossing at Saturn Boulevard, where sewage-tainted water is forced through outdated culverts that spew hydrogen sulfide gas and other toxins throughout south San Diego.

Fixing the hot spot can “mitigate the turbulence in that area, which will mitigate the emissions that basically rocket aerosols into the air,” said San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, who has spearheaded efforts to clean up the river.

But they’re still trying to nail down a funding source for the project. 

Sewage pollution from the cross-border river has plagued Imperial Beach, Coronado and other parts of southern San Diego for decades. The threat rose as the Tijuana population grew and wastewater plants on both sides of the border failed, spilling hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean in recent years.

San Diegans have long known that raw sewage in the ocean is a hazard to swimmers and surfers, and local beaches have been closed for years. Then in 2024, researchers with UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered that the pollution wasn’t just fouling the water. It was also contaminating the air. 

The river emits airborne chemicals including hydrogen sulfide gas, which cause respiratory problems and other ailments among people in neighboring communities. 

Residents experience asthma, stomach problems, skin rashes and headaches, even without going in the water. Parents are wary about letting children play outside. Local schools enforce “rainy day schedules” to keep students inside when air quality worsens.

Researchers traced the air pollution to the Saturn Boulevard hot spot. It’s a culvert set along a rural road near the Tijuana River. The structure, which includes several large concrete pipes, was built decades ago to divert flood waters from neighboring farm fields. When it rains, water trickles across the road and gushes through the pipes, creating mounds of foam and spraying contaminants into the air.

San Diego County officials are trying to secure money to fix that. They estimate it will cost about $25 million to re-engineer the site in order to control the flow of floodwater and prevent it from releasing toxic gas and airborne particles.

There are several parallel tracks to funding the project, but none of them is certain.

One is a pot of money in Proposition 4, the $10 billion climate bond measure that California voters approved in 2024. It includes about $50 million for border projects on the Tijuana River in San Diego and New River in Imperial County. 

Although it passed two years ago, the funds haven’t been released because of administrative procedures that slowed their disbursement. This year state Sen. David Alvarez, a San Diego Democrat, introduced legislation to waive some red tape and speed up funding through the bond measure. 

With the money now available, the State Water Resources Board will accept grant applications for the funds this summer between June and August, and then score and award them by early next year, said Jennifer Toney, a senior engineer with the State Water Resources Control Board. Local governments and nonprofits working on those rivers are eligible to apply.

The board could award up to $20 million for construction such as the Saturn Boulevard project, Conty said. But it faces competition from other possible Tijuana River efforts such as sediment removal, trash capture and others, as well as proposed projects on the New River, Toney said.

On a separate track, state lawmakers have submitted a request in this year’s state budget for $23 million to cover most of the Saturn Boulevard construction. If that’s approved it could free bond money for other border river projects.

A third possible funding source is a proposed half-cent county sales tax, entitled  “Protect San Diego County Health and Safety Act,”  which goes to voters in November. It could generate $360 million per year, with about $80 million of that earmarked for Tijuana River improvements. 

The measure calls for up to 22.5% of tax revenue to be spent on environmental mitigation to address “the toxic sewage crisis in the Tijuana Valley.” But it doesn’t spell out specific projects such as the Saturn Boulevard site, KPBS reported.

In the meantime, an even quicker temporary solution expected to cost $2.5 million could be in place by this time next year. The temporary fix will extend the existing pipes and transfer the flowing water downstream through an enclosed system, County Public Works Director Marisa Barrie stated in an email to CalMatters. That will reduce the churn that causes pollutants to become aerosolized.

“The team evaluated infrastructure mitigation options at the Saturn Boulevard hot spot and agreed to move forward with a short-term solution that will offer tangible immediate benefits,” Barrie stated.

Design, environmental analysis, and permitting for that project is in the works now, Barrie said. It should take about three months to construct, and county officials hope to complete it by March, 2027, before nesting season for birds in the area. 

Aguirre cautioned that reengineering the culvert won’t clean up the river, but will reduce its impact on neighboring communities. “That’s not the permanent solution to the entire crisis. This is something that’s within our power to tackle, working with the state, city and county of San Diego, that we know based on empirical evidence will bring some relief to residents of affected areas.”

We’re bringing our voter guide to life through VotingMatters events across California this month, in collaboration with on-the-ground partners: Local news organizations, colleges and nonprofits. Our next event is this evening in Merced and Fresno and Wednesday in Modesto. Plus, we have a DIY kit to host your own event.

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