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April is Community College Month: Students, local leaders make a case for community college

Apr 16, 2025

Students attend the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence held at the HCC West Loop Campus last week.

A community college education is the best starting point for today’s high school graduates, according to many who have attended and acquired a high-quality higher education with little or no student debt.

For students living within the Houston Community College (HCC) district, choosing to attend HCC was the best option for beginning their higher education journey.

The college is encouraging current and former students, supporters, business partners and our community to join the 2025 Community College Month campaign to bring attention to the value and importance of the college to our community. 

Community College month is a grassroots education and outreach campaign coordinated by the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) across the U.S. The effort’s primary goals are to improve awareness of the economic, academic and employment advantages of attending community colleges.

The campaign also challenges the public and the media to reconsider common misconceptions of community colleges. 

“Economic inequality is a defining quality of our time,” HCC Chancellor Margaret Ford Fisher, Ed.D. "But it doesn't have to be. Across the U.S, students who choose to attend a community college for the first two years of their higher-education careers save an average of $35,000 to $50,000 on the cost of a bachelor's degree.”

HCC also has unique partnerships with local businesses designed to equip students to fulfill in-demand jobs.

“Community College Month is an opportunity to celebrate the importance and value of our college to our community and to demonstrate how we are cultivating skills for the future,” the chancellor said.

Public community colleges are a uniquely American educational model designed to guarantee access to affordable, high-quality higher education for all people. They are the primary educators of life-saving nursing and other healthcare professionals among many others. They also serve as an onramp to bachelor’s, master’s and higher-level degrees for students, particularly for the most demographically and socioeconomically diverse students.

“Everywhere I go, I am told by current and former students that choosing to go to a community college is one of the best decisions they ever made,” said ACCT President and CEO Jee Hang Lee. “The reality is that many students don't realize this until after they attend and realize what opportunities their community college gave them, and how much their instructors at the college cared about them. Our goal is to get the message through to students before they make one of the most consequential financial decisions of their lives: choosing a college or university.”

Learn more about ACCT at https://acct.org.