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Cerritos College

public community college in Norwalk, California, United States

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ5064834 ↗
Source-derived summary

Cerritos College is a public community college in Norwalk, California, United States. It was established in 1955 after a collective regional effort through a landmark vote by residents across seven distinct school districts in the Gateway Cities of Southeast Los Angeles.

Cerritos is a two-year undergraduate institution that enrolled approximately 35,000 students in the 2024–2025 academic year. It houses 284 majors across 97 departments and 11 academic divisions. Its 135-acre (55 ha) campus is located in a suburban neighborhood 15 miles from the Puente Hills and 20 miles from Downtown Los Angeles.

Cerritos has one of the highest return on investment figures in the state of California, and the highest in the greater Los Angeles region. The student body at Cerritos is noted to be high in socioeconomic diversity and is designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, with around 70% of the student body identifying as Hispanic in the 2024–2025 academic year. The college athletics teams, known as the Falcons, compete in the South Coast Conference.

Cerritos alumni include 54 National Football League (NFL) and 32 Major League Baseball (MLB) players and staff. Cerritos alumni have an economic impact of $537.4 million in the greater Los Angeles region.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cerritos College” is public community college in Norwalk, California, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cerritos, College and public, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1955, 2024, 2025—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1955. For this dossier, Cerritos, College and public is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “public community college in Norwalk, California, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5064834. Authority coordinates are 33.886, -118.095. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955, 2024 and 2025.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Cerritos College”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Cerritos College primary sources, Cerritos College archive and Cerritos research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Cerritos College” 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.