Q&A: Chancellor Kimberlee Messina On City College’s Future

City College of San Francisco’s 13th chancellor in 11 years steps into the role as the institution lets out a long-awaited sigh of relief.

After months of uncertainty over accreditation and a turbulent chancellor selection process, the Board of Trustees ratified Kimberlee Messina’s contract on June 26, 2025. Her arrival coincides with a moment of stability: the college’s accreditation has been reaffirmed and its new Student Success Center doors have opened.

Originally growing up in Sacramento, Messina is a proud fourth-generation Californian and first-generation college student. Messina said she was grateful for public education and financial aid, both of which afforded her the opportunity to advance her academic career.

Messina’s first love was teaching Spanish. Having been a foreign language instructor for many years before entering administration, she brings both empathy for faculty members and cultural awareness to the diverse San Francisco community.“I’m really grateful to be in San Francisco, where I get to use my languages and cultural competency and work with such an amazing, diverse community,” Messina said.

The Ingleside Light's Alex Mullaney, who teaches journalism at the college, sat down with the Messina to learn more about her path to the chancellorship and how she hopes the college will continue to evolve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is your approach to education?

I view this work that we do as critical to social mobility and social justice; it’s about transforming lives. I'm a powerful believer in public support of education, which also lends itself to believing in accountability. We have a responsibility to fulfill the mission that we're funded for, and to be very open about our progress and our issues.

Now that the accreditation concerns have been put to bed, can you speak to City College’s struggles with the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges?

The United States is the only country in the world that has a peer accreditation process. We are relying upon our peers to hold us accountable and to hold each other accountable, but in a very professional and educated way. So I think the process itself is really important to public education.

I think that ACCJC in particular has demonstrated a tremendous willingness to engage in very thoughtful dialogue with colleges and universities and to ensure that the process is really about continuous self-improvement, not punitive. 

City College of San Francisco, like many other colleges, has had challenges in terms of some of those standards. And I think it's a testament to the amazing work of the faculty, staff and administration, as well as the trustees, to come together in the past year and really look at ourselves honestly, and see where those things had to be addressed in order to meet those standards.

It was not related to the quality of education in any way, shape, or form. It wasn't related to the quality of services.

It's an institution of 90 years that has demonstrated that students are at the heart of everything we do. But there were some issues in terms of fiscal responsibility, and really the delineation of responsibility and accountability between the Board of Trustees, the Chancellor, and the administration. And I think those issues were resolved in a really good way, and the commission recognized that, which is why they reaffirmed our accreditation.

The onus is on us now to ensure that we continue on the path that we have established. We have created processes and commitments so that we continue to do so for many years to come. We just have to stay on the path.

Why has there been such an effort to adjust the college’s reserve funds?

I can speak to my knowledge of that, which is not as extensive as everyone else's, but there were some changes in terms of the budgetary requirements from the [state] commission.

A long time ago, everyone assumed that a 5% reserve was sufficient. But given the way the world is now, the commission really wanted to ensure that each college could demonstrate that it had two months of money, so it could endure for two months if its revenue stopped, which would necessitate a higher reserve. 

That was challenging for people in the past because they weren't used to having to maintain such a high reserve, which meant that there were fewer funds for other things.

 So I think there was an institutional conversation about how to prioritize funds.

Ultimately, it was agreed that you need to prioritize accreditation and the fiscal stability required by the standards. And yes, that has trade-offs. So how do we deal with that going forward? 

Because of the turnover at the executive level, you know, I'm the 13th chancellor in 11 years, that leads to a lack of ability to focus on those details.

If you're constantly having a new person who's working with the board, you don't have that institutional knowledge or memory sometimes. And I think that has been a challenge for the college, too.

Can you speak to the fears around City College relying more now on part-time faculty?

We have one of the highest full-time faculty ratios in the state and probably the country, so I don't believe that accreditation was responsible for any of the changes there.

I think enrollment at City College, like many community colleges, has been declining for many years. So you can't staff a college for 100,000 students when you have 40,000, so I think for a long time the college was staffed at the student population that it had. The numbers might be different, but I don't think the ratios are different.

Again, I'm in month two here, but at my prior institution, we were facing a lot of similar issues. We had declined 35%, but our full-time faculty had not declined at all. This was a huge fiscal challenge for us, because obviously, you're not getting the same revenue, and so to have those same fixed costs is challenging.

Colleges across the country are still combating ghost students. How is City College approaching the issue?

The state chancellor's office is finally starting to be more engaged, because this is not a local problem. And it's not a new problem, but the technology has changed. The challenge now with AI is that fraudsters can create multiple personas. So we are working on technology as well as human solutions to really shrink that number.

Our IT folks are working with our academic and student affairs people, and making a lot of progress on that.

It's not gone, and we hope it'll get better and better. As we learn new things, we'll have to adapt, but I think we'll eventually reach a very manageable situation. We're on our way there.

How is the college improving its ability to meet student demand in certain course sections?

One of the questions that came up from students, and it was also in the press, was access to chemistry classes. 

But we've made changes by reassigning some faculty to teach those classes, which were in high demand, that we weren't meeting. And so we have much more enrollment capacity in chemistry, for example. 

We're making a lot of changes to how we adjust classroom capacity to better meet student demand. We are not increasing any workload on teachers because we have those caps that are already established, but we're making sure we're actually allowing students to fill up those classes. 

We are adding more sections in high-enrollment areas. I saw our summer data, and both in English and chemistry, we had significantly more students enrolled in the summer, so we were able to expand our capacity in those areas. 

Is the college still putting effort into enrollment growth?

The board authorized the funding to support a 3% growth in enrollment. 

What we're trying to do is actually increase the enrollment in areas where we have not been serving our community. So that does include the capacity of certain classes, but it includes very specifically increasing dual enrollment efforts. We're also expanding our non-credit programs, especially at our Mission Center and our Chinatown Center. We're relocating allied health programs to our John Adams Center to enable us to grow those.

Those types of decisions are crucial for our state funding, because we will need to maximize our center enrollment.

How does enrollment growth relate to restoring the Hold Harmless provision?

It's mathematically impossible. If we grow 3%, that does not get us to restoration. If we grew 3% a year for eight years, it could, but by then we wouldn't have enough money. So it's not realistic, and we have to look at other ways to generate revenue. Our gap is just too large, from where we once were to where we are now. We still want to grow, both strategically and because we want to serve our city, just not for the purpose of state allocation.

You’ve arrived at a time when the college is on a building spree. How about the new Student Success Center?

It's incredible for students to have as close to a one-stop shop as possible. Just wandering around campus last week, I was able to direct several students to that building. Plus, it's accessible physically where it is. It's beautiful, of course, but it's functionally wonderful for our students.