The California Community Colleges is a postsecondary education system in the U.S. state of California. The system includes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges and 73 community college districts. The districts currently operate 116 accredited colleges. The California Community Colleges is the largest system of higher education in the United States, and third largest system of higher education in the world, serving more than 1.8 million students. Despite its plural name, the system is consistently referred to in California law as a singular entity.

Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the California Community Colleges is a part of the state's public higher education system, which also includes the University of California system and the California State University system. Like the two other systems, the California Community Colleges system is headed by an executive officer and a governing board. The 17-member Board of Governors sets direction for the system and is in turn appointed by the governor of California. The board appoints the Chancellor, who is the chief executive officer of the system. Locally elected Boards of Trustees work on the district level with Presidents who run the individual college campuses.

During the early 20th century, the movement to establish junior colleges in California was led by Professor Alexis F. Lange, dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. Both men shared an ulterior motive for supporting the creation of junior colleges. They entertained the hope that one day junior colleges might be able to take over responsibility for all lower-division college-level courses, allowing universities to focus exclusively on upper-division college-level courses, graduate programs, and research. It was under their influence that both Berkeley and Stanford started to draw a clear dividing line between upper and lower divisions of their undergraduate college programs. (Lange and Jordan's desired endpoint never occurred in California—where universities continue to provide lower-division undergraduate education alongside community colleges—but Quebec's Parent Commission was inspired by the California example to take the idea to its logical conclusion, resulting in the creation of CEGEPs.)

In 1907, Lange worked with state senator Anthony Caminetti to bring about the enactment of the Upward Extension Act, the first state law in the United States to formally authorize the creation of junior colleges. Senator Caminetti represented rural Amador County. As articulated by Caminetti, the original rationales for junior colleges were financial, geographical, and practical. Amador County and other rural counties were hundreds of miles away from the state's only universities of any significance at the time: UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Southern California. Such vast distances imposed a massive financial and logistical burden upon rural students who had to move away to attend college and parents who wished to visit their children while they were away at college. Allowing high schools (especially rural ones) to provide two years of lower-division college-level courses meant that "students could stay at home and save money, and parents could supervise their children until they were more mature".

Under the leadership of Fresno school superintendent Charles L. McLane, Fresno High School was the first high school in the state to take advantage of the Upward Extension Act to establish a "Collegiate Department" in the fall of 1910. McLane's argument to the Fresno County Board of Education resembled Caminetti's argument to the state legislature: namely, there was no institution of higher education within 200 miles (321 km) of Fresno and moving away to attend college was both difficult and expensive for local high school graduates and their parents. (This was a bit of an exaggeration, as both Berkeley and Stanford lie within 200 miles of Fresno, but both universities are still more than 150 miles (241 km) away from Fresno.) Berkeley and Stanford assisted with the selection of a principal and a faculty, and 28 students enrolled in the department that fall. The Collegiate Department of Fresno High School later developed into Fresno City College, which is the oldest community college in California and the second oldest community college in the United States. In 1911, the principal of the Collegiate Department, A.C. Olney, transferred to Santa Barbara High School and there created California's second junior college under the Upward Extension Act.

California soon became the leader of the American junior college movement: "In no other state was the vision of the junior college so vigorously pursued as in California." The United States went from zero junior colleges at the start of the 20th century to nineteen junior colleges by 1915, of which eight were based in California: Azusa, Bakersfield, Fresno, Fullerton, Rocklin, San Diego, Santa Ana, and Santa Barbara.

In 1917, the Upward Extension Act was superseded by the Junior College Act, popularly known as the Ballard Act, which established state and county funding support for junior colleges operated as part of K–12 local school districts. The Ballard Act substituted the term "junior college courses" for what had been previously referred to as "post-high school" or "postgraduate courses", and it authorized school districts to offer such courses in "mechanical and industrial arts, household economy, agriculture, civic education, and commerce".

In 1921, the state legislature enacted the District Junior College Law, which created a junior college fund for California's share of revenue from the federal Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 and used the revenue to support the formation of junior college districts which would be entirely separate from school districts. The District Junior College Law originated with a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Elizabeth Hughes. The District Junior College Law was the first law in the United States to authorize the creation of junior college districts, and it was also the first law to pioneer the creation of "public institutions of higher education that were controlled by a local electorate rather than by an academic elite". The District Junior College Law became a national model for the creation of community college districts.