Compton College Ties Basic Needs to Academic Milestones

For years, Compton College has been a forerunner in the push for basic needs support for its students. The community college in Los Angeles offers students one free meal per day, in addition to transit passes, food pantry access and weekly $20 vouchers for its on-campus farmers market. It also has a unique data-sharing agreement with the Los Angeles Department of Public and Social Services to help students sign up for food benefits, and the college plans to open the first community college student housing in L.A. next summer.

Those services were born out of high need: A 2025 #RealCollege survey from the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University found that more than half of respondents from the college reported facing food insecurity in the last 30 days. A whopping 68 percent said they’d experienced housing insecurity in the last year.

But some supports for those students will soon have strings attached. Starting in fall 2027, Compton is launching a controversial new plan that ties some basic needs supports to academic requirements, in the hopes of upping completion rates at the college. Compton leaders say the goal is to incentivize students to take steps toward completion, graduate them more quickly and reduce the number of students reliant on these resources year to year, making it easier for the college to continue to afford providing services to other students. But some basic needs experts worry the move will deter financially strapped students from accessing food supports.

Under the new plan, students starting their second year will only be able to access free meals and farmers market vouchers if they complete a set of tasks, including filing an education plan and signing up for Handshake, a career-preparation platform, by the end of their first year. Degree-seeking or transfer students will need to take transfer-level English and math in their first year of enrollment and pass those courses by the end of their third year. They will also need to earn credits at a steady clip—at least nine units per semester—but they can’t accumulate too many credits, either. Depending on their major, students have a cap of 70 or 80 units before they lose access to supports. The move is intended to encourage students to stay on track and avoid taking extra credits they don’t need to transfer or graduate. Certificate students and noncredit students have their own sets of requirements, and dual-enrollment students are exempt.

Some supports, such as the food pantry, transit passes and technology loans will remain open to all students—as long as they’re in good financial standing with the college.

Compton College President Keith Curry sees the policy shift as one step toward the larger goal of ratcheting up student completion rates by 2035, a charge from the California Community Colleges system to its institutions. He said a deep dive into the college’s data shows too many students are racking up excess credits without graduating or transferring, or they’re not taking or passing the classes they need to transfer, sometimes spending down their Pell Grants and hurting their ability to afford future education.

He emphasized that educational plans, and other measures on the list of requirements, have been shown to improve completion rates, but getting students to fulfill them—even when they’re mandatory—can be a challenge.

“If a student doesn’t have an ed plan, doesn’t go see a counselor … the counselors are going to classrooms, they’re doing everything they’re supposed to do, but the students are not coming in … what do you want me to do?” he said.

Fewer than a third, 27 percent, of Compton College students graduate, and 10 percent transfer out, within three years, according to 2024 data from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Compton’s most recent strategic plan promises to tackle completion rates, and the college also committed to increasing a range of student success outcomes—like course success, persistence and completion rates for transfer-level English and math—by 2035. The basic needs strategy is one piece of that work, according to Curry.

“It’s about institutional transformation,” Curry said. “We’re setting expectations for our students because … that’s how important it is that we want to see our students complete.”

Curry also wants the college to keep up the level of basic needs services it currently offers, but it’s “not sustainable” if students are staying enrolled for “five to six or seven years” and straining those services, he said. For the past academic year, as of March, the college spent $186,000 on technology support, $326,000 on food services and over $62,000 on housing support. More than 5,500 students got free meals through Everytable, a company that partners with the college to combat food insecurity, and 851 students got farmers market vouchers.

The college plans to share the new basic needs requirements with students next month.

“We’re messaging it to students, ‘This is about helping to support you,’” Curry said. “But my gut and what I feel is—and I’ve seen this before in our community—students are going to step up to the expectation because they have seen the institution step up for them.”

Strong Reactions

Basic needs experts, however, are leery. They argue the plan would put up extra barriers for students and deter them from accessing the college’s resources.

Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of public health emeritus at the City University of New York, who led work on the CUNY system’s food insecurity program, said he’s all for keeping students on track, but he worries that tying otherwise positive academic requirements to students’ food supports will backfire and hurt students.

“Everything I know about both public benefits and college benefits is that the more requirements you add, the more you lose people, and often the people you lose are the neediest people,” he said.

He emphasized that many community college students struggle with “time poverty” as they juggle work, family care and other responsibilities, making it harder for them to figure out—much less complete—new requirements.

“They just have so much to do to get through their daily lives, and to add new requirements seems at best pointless and at worst cruel,” Freudenberg said. He also worries the students best able to access Compton’s free meals and other services may be the students with the most bandwidth to meet the new standards, not necessarily those who most need the supports.

Mark Huelsman, director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center, said even requiring students be in good financial standing with the college to access technology loans or the food pantry could block students from services they need. He said students can fall into a vicious cycle where financial precarity puts them behind on payments to the college, limiting their access to food and other benefits that could help them get into a better financial situation. He fears “penalizing students if they get tripped up financially.”

“Where we want to be extremely careful with these kinds of things is making sure that students aren’t faced with undue red tape or administrative burdens or other hurdles just to be able to eat at the end of the day,” Huelsman said.

He noted that Compton’s approach is reminiscent of some campus and state emergency aid programs, as well as the federal financial aid system, which require students to maintain satisfactory academic performance to access or retain benefits.

He emphasized that the requirements Compton is putting in place do help students to complete—but so do basic needs supports, and he worries about pitting one against the other.

“Integrating basic needs supports into broader completion strategies is a great concept,” he said, citing as an example the practice of connecting students using food and housing services to academic supports like career counseling. “I think the devil’s in the details.”

Huelsman also sympathized with community college leaders like Compton’s, who are trying to offer a wide range of benefits “with less than ideal funding,” especially as cuts to federal benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid put more pressure on campuses to fill the gaps.

But he doesn’t want savings to come from students not taking advantage of services that could help them, he said. The question is, “Are you saving money because students are … getting to and through faster, or are you saving money because fewer students are even seeking help in the first place?”

A Test Case

Others support experimenting with hinging basic needs services on steps toward college completion.

Meacie Fairfax, strategy director at Complete College America, praised Compton for taking an innovative approach.

“Compton College does deserve real credit for trying to link basic needs to completion outcomes rather than just treating them as separate efforts,” she said. “We want to make sure that [students] get to those milestones.”

She has some concerns about students’ access to supports, but said the requirements are designed to kick in after a student’s first year, which gives them some time to learn what services are available and what’s expected of them.

She also said it makes sense that colleges that invest large sums in student services and supports want to ensure “we and they are getting a return on the investments that they’re putting into our colleges.”

Over all, she believes the requirements align with research on college completion, and she’s curious to see what Compton learns.

“This is the kind of experimentation that the field needs,” she said of Compton’s plan, “and we welcome it as long as it comes back with … some information to inform the field. They’re leaning in the right direction, because these are things that are actually only going to be beneficial for these students.”

Curry said he expected a range of reactions. His own faculty members responded to the idea with a mix of concern and support. But he nonetheless believes the new strategy is “groundbreaking” and potentially a model for other colleges to follow. He also emphasized that the college is going to monitor how the policy affects students every year.

“Will some of these advocates say, ‘Oh, I don’t know about this’?” he said. “Yeah, but … we have to continue to focus on completion, because in higher ed, we’re going to be criticized for return on investment and economic mobility of our students. That means we have to make sure our students complete in a timely manner, make sure our students transfer or get a job when they leave our institutions.”

“I think it’s going to be a movement,” he added. “I think people are going to be looking for ways to support their students, but also to help move students along their way.”