Community colleges have built our identity around one word: access. It’s in our mission statements, our marketing, our grant applications. We talk about open doors, removing barriers, meeting students where they are. But look through our own websites, catalogs and enrollment forms, and you’ll find a different story — one written in a dialect that most first-generation students have never been taught to speak.
Matriculation. Bursar. Census date. Prerequisite override. Articulation agreement. FERPA waiver. These aren’t just unfamiliar words. They’re gatekeeping mechanisms, even when nobody intends them to be. A term like “matriculation” might feel like harmless institutional shorthand to the people who use it every day, but to a student whose parents never attended college, it can be the difference between registering for classes on time and missing a deadline they didn’t know existed because they didn’t understand the sentence that described it.
This is the uncomfortable truth community college leaders need to confront: our language is a barrier.
Beyond confusing jargon
Most of the jargon in higher education wasn’t designed to exclude anyone. It evolved the way professional language always does — as shorthand among people who already understand the system. Financial aid officers know what “SAP” means. Registrars know the difference between a “drop” and a “withdrawal,” and why it matters for a transcript. Academic advisors can rattle off “gen ed,” “co-req” and “articulation” without a second thought.
But first-generation students often don’t have a translator in the room. They don’t have a parent who went through the process and can say, “Oh, that just means…” They’re often figuring out enrollment, financial aid and degree planning by reading forms and emails cold, sometimes while working full-time, raising children or navigating English as a second language. For these students, every unfamiliar term is a small tax — a moment of confusion, hesitation or shame that adds friction to a process that’s already unfamiliar and high-stakes.
We know from research on cognitive load and decision-making that confusion doesn’t just slow people down; it causes them to disengage entirely. A student who doesn’t understand what “satisfactory academic progress” means, or why it’s suddenly threatening their financial aid, is more likely to quietly stop showing up than to ask for help. We call this “student attrition.” Often, it’s just a comprehension failure we never bothered to fix.
Institutions have gotten reasonably good at certain kinds of accessibility. We caption videos. We make sure PDFs work with screen readers. We build ADA-compliant buildings and websites. These are necessary and worthwhile. But accessibility that stops with physical and technical accommodation while ignoring linguistic accommodation is only half the job — and arguably the easier half, because it doesn’t require us to look inward.
Simplifying our language means admitting that the way we’ve always talked about our own institutions may be part of the problem. That’s a harder kind of accessibility work, because it asks something of us personally, not just of our compliance office. It asks faculty to rewrite syllabi. It asks financial aid offices to stop copying federal regulatory language directly into student-facing emails. It asks catalog committees to question whether “co-requisite remediation” needs to exist as a phrase anywhere a student will actually read it.
Four tips to simplify messaging
If community college leaders are serious about this, authenticity must replace jargon. It’s not enough to add a glossary page buried three clicks deep on the website or to run one plain-language workshop and call it done. Authentic accessibility means:
- Auditing language at the point of contact. Enrollment forms, financial aid letters, degree audits and advising emails are where students meet the institution for the first time and most often. These documents deserve the same scrutiny as a building’s compliance with disability law.
- Testing comprehension with real students, not just editing internally. Sit down with first-generation students and watch where they stumble. The words that trip them up are rarely the ones staff members expect.
- Rewriting policy language, not just translating it. A glossary that defines “matriculation” in plain English is a patch. Actually replacing “matriculation” with “enrollment” throughout student communication is the fix. If a term must remain for legal or systems reasons, plain language should carry the primary explanation, with the technical term offered only as a secondary reference.
- Treating this as an opportunity issue, not a communications issue. Plain language shouldn’t live only in the marketing department’s style guide. It belongs in strategic plans, in professional development, in how we train new advisors and financial aid counselors, because it directly affects retention and completion — the outcomes we’re already accountable for.
There’s a reason institutional jargon persists: it’s comfortable. It signals professionalism to peers, it feels precise and changing it takes real effort. But comfort for staff should never come at the cost of clarity for students, especially at institutions that have built their entire brand on being the accessible option in higher education.
Community colleges serve the students most likely to be navigating this system for the first time in their families. If our mission statements say “access” and our enrollment forms say, “Please submit your matriculation documentation prior to the census date,” we are working against ourselves. Simplifying our language isn’t a lesser form of accessibility work. It may be the most direct form we have — and it’s entirely within our control to fix starting now.
