City Colleges of Chicago
Public community college system

The City Colleges of Chicago is the public municipal community college system of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The system, through its subordinate colleges, offers associate degrees, certificates, free courses for the GED, and free English as a second language (ESL) courses.
The system has its administrative offices in the Loop of Chicago. It is led by a Board-appointed Chancellor and governed by a seven-member Board of Trustees, whose members are appointed by the Mayor of Chicago and approved by the Chicago City Council.
As of 2021, the system had a yearly count of nearly 70,000 students and more than 4,000 faculty and staff members. Juan Salgado has been the chancellor of the City Colleges system since 2017.
Locations
The system operates seven colleges across the city of Chicago. The seven colleges and their community areas are respectively:
Harold Washington College, the Loop
Harry S Truman College, Uptown (North Side)
Kennedy–King College, Englewood (South Side)
Malcolm X College, Near West Side (West Side)
Olive–Harvey College, Pullman (Far South Side)
Richard J. Daley College, West Lawn (Southwest Side)
Wilbur Wright College, Dunning (Northwest Side)
History
Crane Junior College opened on September 11, 1911. The first class held by the college had 30 students. By 1929 the enrollment increased to 4,000 students, and Crane was the largest community college in the United States.
“City Colleges of Chicago” enters the record as public community college system. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what City, Colleges and Chicago can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5123128. VIAF identifies the subject as 131382770. The Library of Congress control number is n83008054. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2017, 1911 and 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “City Colleges of Chicago” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.