This 2025-26 school year, Ventura College is marking their 100th year of education

Ventura College was established as the first college in Ventura County in 1925, when a junior college section was added at Ventura Union High School, the public high school in Ventura that was founded in 1889 as the city’s first high school. In 1929, the Ventura High School District adopted the four-four plan of secondary education, providing four years of junior high school (grades 7-10) and four years of high school/junior college (grades 11-14). The next year, Ventura Junior College was moved to a new campus at Main and Catalina Streets, the present location of VHS.

“Ventura College has changed drastically in the past 100 years. In 1925 Ventura College started as a single classroom at Ventura Union High School with just 16 students. Today, Ventura College has two campus locations in Santa Paula and Ventura and serves over 12,000 students annually. What started as a small local college is now 2 campuses that provide transfer pathways, career training, and lifelong learning,” said director of marketing and outreach Vanessa Villavicencio Stotler

This year, Ventura College will be celebrating their Centennial year. On Ventura College’s website, they display a gallery of photos showcasing the college’s history and its changes throughout the past 100 years.

“One of the biggest benefits of attending [Ventura College] is definitely the financial cost. I mean classes are like, 30 bucks per class and can be free if you have financial aid,” said Dylan Elder ‘27.

The Aspen Institute has again named Ventura College among the 150 institutions eligible to compete for the $1 million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, which recognizes high achievements and performance among community colleges. According to the VC website, “The institutions selected for this honor stand out among more than 1,000 community colleges nationwide as having high and improving levels of student success as well as equitable outcomes for Black and Hispanic students and those from lower-income backgrounds.” The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence highlights exemplary community colleges in order to research effective student success strategies while also driving attention to colleges achieving post-graduate success for all students.

“[Attending Ventura College] gives students a little bit extra time to figure out what they might want to do if they’re not sure on their major yet. So that buys a little bit of time while they’re working on general-ed and then also, it increases your opportunities of getting into some more competitive universities as a transfer student than it does as a direct student. So, that’s helpful because again, if a student wants to put themselves in a position to be a little bit more competitive to get into a particular school, then going as a transfer,” said college and career counselor Patricia Roberts.