California Community Colleges System
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| Motto | Empowering community colleges through leadership, advocacy, and support |
|---|---|
| Type | Public community college system |
| Established | 1967 |
| Endowment | US$25 million (planned permanent endowment) |
| Chancellor | Eloy Ortiz Oakley |
| Students | 2,400,000 |
| Location | Sacramento, California |
| Affiliations | California Community Colleges |
| Website | www.cccco.edu |
The California Community Colleges System (CCCS) consists of 113 community colleges in 72 community college districts in the U.S. state of California. Created by legislation in 1967, it is the largest system of higher education in the world, serving more than 2.4 million students with a wide variety of educational and career goals.
Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the CCCS is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the University of California system and the California State University system. Like the two other systems, the CCCS is headed by an executive officer and a governing board. The 17 member Board of Governors (BOG) sets direction for the system and is in turn appointed by the California Governor. They appoint the Chancellor who is the chief executive officer of the system. Locally elected Boards of Trustees work on the district level with Presidents who run the individual college campuses.
The CCCS is a founding and charter member of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, the nonprofit organization which provides extremely high-performance Internet-based networking to California's K-12 research and education community.
In 1907, the California State Legislature, seeing a benefit to society in education beyond high school but realizing the load could not be carried by existing colleges, authorized the state's high schools to create "junior colleges" to offer what were termed "postgraduate courses of study" similar to the courses offered in just the first two years of university studies. A collegiate "department" of Fresno High School was set up in the fall of 1910 that later developed into becoming Fresno City College, which is the oldest existing public community college in California and the second oldest existing public community college in the United States.
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