Massachusetts Community Colleges Open Pathways to Education & Careers:
  • Serving more than 110,510 students across 15 institutions, with 92,210 students in credit courses and 18,300 students exclusively in noncredit courses.
  • Accounting for 46 percent of undergraduate credit enrollments in FY22.
  • Representing 38 percent of the students in the Massachusetts public higher education system in FY22.
Massachusetts Community Colleges make Higher Education more Accessible to a Diverse Population:
  • Offering open enrollment, convenient locations, affordable tuition, financial aid and student services.
  • Educating the largest sector of college students requiring developmental education.
  • Serving the highest percentage of low-income students in higher education – 28 percent of all Pell recipients in Massachusetts attend community colleges (these students receive more than $90 million in Pell grant aid).
  • Offering students a solid set of academic, career and technology skills that present opportunities for both immediate and long-term career growth and lifelong learning.
  • Supporting K-12 education through collaborative partnerships with school districts in every region of the Commonwealth including, but not limited to: school-to-career programs, college planning, early college programs, dual enrollment, and with more than 14 statewide articulation agreements with Vocational Technical High Schools.
  • Preparing and helping students to transfer to four-year colleges/universities with significant cost savings through the Commonwealth Commitment as well as with more than 800 articulation agreements with four-year public and private institutions globally (including three statewide transfer agreements with Northeastern University, Dean College and Suffolk University who accept the entire MassTransfer Block and provide scholarships to community college transfer students).
Massachusetts Community Colleges Serve as a Resource for their Communities:
  • Offering a wide range of Community Education courses, especially engaging senior citizens in lifelong learning programs/courses.
  • Providing cultural and arts programming; sports and recreation; and community programs that are open to the public.
  • Offering essential support services to the greater community through dental clinics, health care initiatives, tax preparation, and law clinics.
  • Serving as the first stop on the educational pipeline for police officers, firefighters, nurses, medical assistants, and other healthcare providers.
Massachusetts Community Colleges are Leaders in Creating & Delivering Customized Workforce Training Programs:
  • Significantly responding to changes in the local economy with more than 288,000 total enrollments in noncredit vocationally-oriented customized workforce development courses since 2008.
  • Creating and delivering low-cost training, retraining programs, certification, skills improvement and program development for more 3,600 organizations including local business and industry, nonprofits, unions, and state and federal agencies.

*Annual Enrollment data provided by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education for FY 2022.
**Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), 12-month Enrollment component 2021-22 provisional data.
***Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), Student Financial Aid 2021-22 provisional data.