Consumer Disclosures and Budget
As a member of the California Community Colleges system, information about Calbright’s student body, budget, and operations is publicly available. This page is updated to provide information regarding the College’s budget as well as current facts and figures about student enrollment and demographics.
Consumer Disclosures
Calbright College was created to serve adult learners across California. We are the only community college in the state that offers a competency-based model for education in a 100% online medium.
Our student body reflects our mission and continues to grow at a rapid pace. As of March 2024, Calbright has a student body of more than 4,300 learners, representing 52 out of 58 counties across the state. More than 90% are at least 25 years old—nearly 40% are at least 40 years old—and have responsibilities that make online, flexibly paced programs their only or most viable option. They are working adults, whether or not they work for pay, and are unemployed, underemployed, displaced, reentering, or have jobs that are low-wage, dead-end, weand/or in declining sectors. Nearly a third of Calbright’s students are parents/caregivers, compared to roughly 10% across the California Community Colleges (CCC) system.
Student Enrollment and Demographics
Our non-traditional academic calendar allows students to enroll and begin coursework immediately at any time of year.
What are the demographics of Calbright’s student body?
- 51.5% of our students are ages 25-39 and 38.5% are 40 years of age or older;
- Median age is late 30s
- 51% identify as male, 43.6% as female, 1.5% as non-binary, and 4% decline to state;
- A majority of students are people of color, including 31..9% who identify as Latinx, 23% who identify as Black, and 17.6% who identify as Asian.
What do students say about Calbright?
In our annual Student Experience Survey, as of November 2023, we found that 75.6% of students reported that they were satisfied or very satisfied with what they had learned in their programs, 75.6% were satisfied with their overall experience at Calbright, and 91.1% of students would recommend Calbright to someone else.
Students shared positive feedback about Calbright’s supportive environment: “There is a true sense of community at Calbright and it is an extremely supportive program.”
And about how Calbright’s curriculum is useful for transitioning careers: “As this is self paced, it’s been a perfect program for me to transition to IT even though I have experience already before, everything is kind of new to since it’s been more than a decade already since I’ve applied what I’ve learned from my school before.”
Read about some of our students and their stories.
What are Calbright’s persistence and completion rates?
Calbright’s founding legislation calls for a seven-year startup period to build a new kind of college from the ground up. The College is currently more than halfway through this startup period, which concludes in early 2026. As a new institution, Calbright has limited and/or preliminary data regarding student success and will continue to update this space as new information and learnings are available.
We have a non-traditional academic calendar, which allows students to enroll immediately, but it also means we don’t have traditional semesters that many community colleges use to measure student progress and success. To address this, we place students into cohorts by the quarter in which they enrolled.
Like many institutions in the California Community Colleges system, we use a three-year period to generate completion rates. Calbright’s earliest enrollments started in October 2019. Of the students who enrolled at Calbright between October 2019 and June 2020, 8.5% have completed. This rate reflects students who were part of the College’s “Beta-Cohort”.
For comparison, this early completion rate for the Beta-Cohort is higher than the California Community Colleges system’s completion rate for Chancellor’s Office Approved Certificates (statewide data source). Across the system, 5% of first-time students who enrolled during the 2020-2021 academic year earned their certificate within three years.
Further, the system’s completion rates for non-traditional adult learners highlight the importance of Calbright’s role as the leading edge of the learning curve for identifying support systems for these working adults. Students who were 25 years old and older who enrolled in the California Community Colleges system for the first time during the 2019-2020 academic year had a 6.5% three-year completion rate for Chancellor’s Office Approved Certificates. For associate’s degrees, the completion rate is less than 4.4%.
Calbright’s student persistence from an initial term of enrollment to a second hovers around 94%, compared with roughly 60% for adult learners across the California Community Colleges system. Increased persistence has sparked sustained enrollment growth and completion numbers, as more students successfully progress through their curriculum.
Budget
Calbright’s Board of Trustees, as well as State and California Community Colleges system policies, require that each annual budget meet the following criteria:
- The annual budget shall support the College’s strategic priorities.
- Assumptions upon which the budget is based are presented to the Board for review.
- A schedule is provided to the Board by March of each year that includes dates for presentation of the tentative budget, required public hearing, Board study sessions, and approval of the final budget. At the public hearing, interested persons may appear and address the Board regarding the proposed budget or any item in the proposed budget.
- Unrestricted general reserves shall be no less than five percent (5%) of the general fund.
- Changes in the assumptions upon which the budget was based shall be reported to the Board in a timely manner.
- Budget projections address long-term goals and commitments.
Timeline
Each budget’s timeline for the following year is developed by March. Calbright’s administration produces a tentative budget for the Board of Trustees to review each June. Board study sessions and development of the budget, including public hearings, then occur from July-August, with a completed budget voted upon and sent to the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges in September.
After the budget is approved, the Chief Executive Officer/President (or designee) shall make quarterly periodic reports to the Board and shall keep the Board fully advised regarding the financial status of the College, including a mid-year report showing the financial and budgetary condition of the College.
Previous Budgets
Calbright College was established by the state of California in June, 2018, and its first annual budget was for fiscal year 2020. Below are current and past summaries of our budgets: