Why Community College of Vermont Is Growing as College Costs Climb
As the state's four-year campuses cut programs and ran deficits, CCV grew. The reasons are structural — and they're reshaping the choices facing Vermont families.
When roughly 500 graduates crossed the stage at Norwich University’s Shapiro Field House on June 6 to collect their degrees from the Community College of Vermont, the ceremony read like a feel-good story — and it was.
The class, by CCV’s account, spanned ages 18 to 79, drew from all 14 Vermont counties, included 16 veterans, and was more than 60 percent first-generation college graduates.
But the more revealing story isn’t who graduated. It’s that CCV is the one public higher-education institution in Vermont that hasn’t spent the last six years cutting programs, merging campuses, or staring down deficits — and that is not luck.
It’s structure. And it answers a question every Vermonter paying property taxes or weighing where to send a kid should be asking: Why are community colleges growing while four-year schools contract — and what does that mean for where Vermonters go to college, and what it costs them?
What’s actually happening at CCV
CCV says spring 2026 enrollment rose about 5 percent, and the college calls itself Vermont’s second-largest, serving close to 10,000 Vermonters a year across all its programs. (Its federally reported headcount was about 5,400 in 2023-24.) And the mix has shifted hard online: between fall 2019 and fall 2025, CCV reported online course-taking up 69 percent and in-person down 59 percent.
That shift shows up in the college’s footprint. CCV has steadily shed real estate — folding sites into shared space like the Fairbanks Museum, and this spring leaving its Springfield and Morrisville buildings entirely for remote services and in-person outreach.
This is a single operating logic: hold enrollment by following students online, and take down fixed real-estate cost as you go.
Why the model is so resilient
Vermont’s four-year public colleges were pushed to the brink — their chancellor proposed closing three campuses in 2020 — because they carried the costs that CCV was built without.
In April 2020, then-Chancellor Jeb Spaulding proposed closing three Vermont State Colleges campuses and laying off close to 500 employees to close a budget gap; he resigned amid the backlash. The eventual fix, approved by the trustees in 2021, merged Castleton, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College into a single Vermont State University, which launched July 1, 2023.
The Community College of Vermont was left out of that merger; the same committee that consolidated the four-year schools urged CCV to lean further into workforce and adult education — a sign of how different its challenges were from the residential campuses’.
The contrast since is in the system’s own budget books. Vermont State University has run years of structural deficits, under a state mandate to close the gap by $5 million a year for five years. To get there it moved to cut about 10 academic programs and as many as 33 faculty positions, consolidated or relocated two dozen more, and reversed a contested plan to digitize libraries and drop sports — all before it formally opened.
And the squeeze isn’t confined to the merged campuses. The University of Vermont — the state’s flagship, a separate system — disclosed this spring that it faces a roughly $12 million deficit and projects a 15 percent drop in first-year and transfer enrollment, with tuition supplying two-thirds of its general fund.
(Compass examined UVM’s math separately.) When the flagship and the merged university are both contracting and only the community college is growing, the pattern isn’t institutional. It’s structural.
The reason traces to fixed cost. CCV runs on leased and shared space rather than an owned campus, adjuncts rather than a large tenured faculty, and none of the dorms, dining halls, sports or research that make a residential university expensive to run and nearly impossible to shrink fast. When enrollment falls, those are the costs that sink a four-year school — and CCV doesn’t carry most of them. So when Vermont’s demographic decline hit, CCV could bend where the universities had to cut deep.
CCV’s answer to a shrinking pool of freshmen was to widen every other door — adult learners, online students, and a state-funded stream of high schoolers — so the typical CCV student today is in their mid-20s, working, often a parent, and increasingly online.
This isn’t just a Vermont story
CCV’s trajectory mirrors a national realignment the National Student Clearinghouse has tracked sector by sector.
In fall 2025, total U.S. enrollment rose just 1.0 percent — but the movement underneath is the story. Community college enrollment grew 3.0 percent, leading every sector, while private nonprofit four-year colleges declined 1.6 percent. The spring was sharper still: community colleges added about 288,000 students, a 5.4 percent jump.
Two engines drive it. Vocational and trade programs grew about 20 percent over five years; and short credentials have surged — community colleges now enroll some 752,000 certificate students, up 28 percent since 2021, with certificates and associate degrees outgrowing bachelor’s.
CCV is built for exactly this shift, leaning on stackable credentials and certificates alongside its associate degrees.
The price gap — and what it’s changing
The shift isn’t only toward a different credential. It’s toward a different price — and the gap has become a difference in kind.
The expensive part of a four-year education isn’t the teaching — it’s the living. For 2025-26, the College Board puts average total cost of attendance at about $21,000 a year at a community college, about $31,000 at an in-state public university, and about $65,000 at a private one. Room and board alone runs $14,000 to $16,000 at a residential school — a bill a CCV student, living at home and usually working, largely skips.
One honest caveat: net tuition — what students pay after grant aid — has actually fallen, and community college students have, on average, had tuition covered by aid since 2009. But covered tuition isn’t a covered education — books, transportation and living are the bulk of that $21,000, and they don’t vanish when tuition is waived, landing hardest on low-income commuters. The four-year degree isn’t becoming unaffordable the way sticker prices suggest; the full cost of going still bites.
As the price of the residential experience has climbed, the enrollment has moved: more students are choosing the lower-cost, online path, and fewer are landing at the private colleges where that bundle costs the most.
The gap is widest in Vermont
The gap is widest in Vermont, whose average in-state public four-year tuition, near $18,090, ranks among the nation’s highest. CCV’s bet — sell the credential, skip the residential bundle — is, in effect, a bet this pattern holds. What it means for any one student the numbers can’t say; that depends on what the residential experience is worth to the family weighing it.
The pivots that worked
Stripped to the data, four moves carried CCV through the cliff. It went where the students were — online, while in-person kept falling — holding enrollment without holding buildings. It cut fixed cost as it went, converting owned space to shared or remote. It made itself free, both directions: 802Opportunity gives free tuition to households earning up to $100,000 — about 70 percent of Vermont families — and was used by nearly 2,800 students last year, while the state funds a pipeline the other way, letting high schoolers take CCV courses, or a full senior year, free. And it sold credentials that attach to jobs — short, applied programs in fields like healthcare, childcare and business. As those free pathways expanded, CCV’s enrollment rose against the national trend, and the college credits removing the cost barrier.
What hasn’t worked — and the shadow side of the model
The same features that make community colleges resilient create real liabilities, and an honest accounting has to name them.
The completion number looks dismal — until you read what it measures. Only about one in five of CCV’s first-time, full-time students earn a credential within three years. But that federal yardstick captures only a small slice of CCV — first-time, full-time students are under 4 percent of enrollment, and much of the rest isn’t degree-seeking at all, from dual-enrolled high schoolers to workers taking a single course. By CCV’s own count, nearly half of graduates continue their education. The measure was built for residential colleges and barely fits this one — which cuts both ways: CCV’s real picture is better than the headline, and the sector’s “low completion” reputation is partly an artifact of measuring the wrong thing. What’s not in dispute is that part-time, working students do finish more slowly and stop out more often — a real vulnerability the growth can hide.
The online pivot is also a vulnerability. In California, the shift online opened community colleges to mass “ghost student” fraud: the state flagged some 1.2 million applications as fraudulent in 2024 — about 31 percent of applicants — and reported handing millions in aid to fake students, a small fraction of the total, before lawmakers requested a state audit. The mechanism is relevant to Vermont: the open, online, low-friction enrollment fueling community college growth is exactly what fraudsters exploit. There’s no evidence of comparable fraud at CCV — but it’s the same door CCV keeps opening wider.
“Adjustment” has a human cost too. CCV’s building exits are cheaper than VTSU’s program cuts, but closing a physical presence in towns like Springfield and Morrisville removes a local front door in exactly the rural communities with the least broadband and the fewest alternatives. Remote-first access is not equal access.
The bottom line for Vermont
The commencement photo obscures the actual finding: CCV isn’t growing because it’s a better school than the four-year colleges. It’s growing because it was built without the costs that the demographic cliff turns lethal — and because recent enrollment has swung toward the low-cost, online, job-attached, non-residential model CCV already runs.
That makes CCV genuinely less vulnerable than a residential four-year campus. It does not make it invulnerable, and it does not make the trend an unambiguous good. The same forces lifting CCV are widening the distance between two paths through college — the residential four-year experience, whose price keeps rising, and the lower-cost, online route CCV runs — and which path a Vermont family takes increasingly follows what it can afford. CCV’s own strengths and exposures are the same facts seen from two sides: open, online, free, adjunct-light — and slow to completion, exposed to the online enrollment-fraud risk now hitting the sector, and pulling back from the rural towns that can least absorb a remote-only college. For Vermont, the question the next few years will answer is whether “resilient” and “good for students” turn out to be the same thing.
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Thoughtful, well written!