Mt. SAC inreach sent an email out to students and staff regarding the upcoming changes for the fall semester regarding class titles to fit the common course numbering initiative that started in the fall 2025 semester.

Common course numbering originates from Assembly Bill 1111 which was signed into law in 2021.

Kelly Rivera is the Common Course Numbering Liaison for Mt. SAC as well as a professor on campus. According to her, the purpose of the CCN system is to streamline the transfer process across California community colleges.

“The simplest way to explain it is that the law asks all the 116 community colleges to align their courses in the general education curriculum pattern so they use the same course number and title for comparable courses,” Rivera said.

ENGL 1A -> ENGL C1000

ENGL 1C -> ENGL C1001

MATH 110 -> STAT C1000

PSYC 1A -> PSYC C1000

POLI 1 -> POLS C1000

SPCH 1A -> COMM C1000

These classes were specifically chosen for the first phase due to their high number of enrollments in the last few years according to Rivera.

“Those six courses were chosen because they are the most enrolled courses across the whole system,” Rivera said. “They generated over a half a million enrollments in 2022 and 2023.”

It should be noted as well that if students took classes under their former course titles, they do not have to retake them under their new CCN titles.

Phase 2a is scheduled to launch in the upcoming fall semester changing the following seven classes.

AHIS 4 -> ARTH C1100

AHIS 5 -> ARTH C1200

BUSC 1A -> ECON C2002

BUSC 1B -> ECON C2001

ENGL 1B -> ENGL C1002

HIST 7 -> HIST C1001

HIST 8 -> HIST C1002.

However, as indicated by its name, phase 2 is split up into an a side and a b side. Phase 2b is scheduled to come in fall 2027. After that, there is phase 3 which focuses on lab sciences, however that phase is on hold currently due to articulation issues with the California State University and University of California systems.

“We want to make sure our curriculum articulates throughout the system so that when a student takes a class at community college, it’s accepted for credit within the major and for transfer at the CSU or the UC,” Rivera said. “The problem is that when it was initially rolled out in phase 1, 2a and 2b, the articulation piece wasn’t worked out ahead of time.”

This led to new articulation agreements having to be made for these new courses, but should the CSUs or UCs reject a new common course numbering course, it puts students’s transferability at risk, although there haven’t been issues with it so far.

“There hasn’t ever been an issue thus far where students have lost articulation,” Rivera said “You could see where there may be potentially down the line it could be an issue.”

Students interested in seeing the upcoming changes can visit the Academic Senate of California Community Colleges website here.