Thousands of people in the stands and the students’ section at Cougar Stadium Friday saw a first for the College of the Canyons.
The roughly 2,300-member 2026 graduating class began degree conferment with a group of new degree holders: 10 students were given their bachelor’s degrees in building design, a program for students intending to pursue an architecture master’s.
The future of COC, and the average graduate, is pivoting at a rapid clip, but shake-ups in the labor market have been fomenting for several years: The college’s building design bachelor’s holders are the culmination of plans in the college’s applied technologies school that began years ago.
As the college lays new groundwork this summer for its technical education and career training programs — with a new commercial driver’s license course starting in July and the bidding process for the construction of a permanent advanced technology center scheduled to start this season — it seems that most everyone is anticipating a transformed workforce over the next few decades.
Keynote speaker Jonathan Gonzalez, an NBC4 news anchor and reporter who studied new media arts at COC, said as much in his address Friday, injecting a little advice on how to approach using a tool that’s become a specter over the white collar industry: artificial intelligence.
Gonzalez said he’d heard enough commencement speakers getting booed for mentioning AI to tread lightly.
“I ask everyone in this crowd tonight, may you enter any AI development the same way you leave it, with integrity, with ethics, and with humanity. It may become the most useful tool in all of our lives, but be curious enough to be wary of the intentions of those pushing it onto you,” Gonzalez said. “All right, sorry, that’s just what ChatGPT told me to say.”
Gonzalez added it was important for the graduates in the audience to be wary of stagnating as learners, and to use that student-esque adaptability to better navigate curveballs.
“You are not done learning,” Gonzalez said. “You are never done learning, nor should you be. Life is anything but linear. Life is an obstacle course, but it is not an impossible one, not when you’re always learning how to adapt and evolve.”
Just looking at 2026’s numbers, COC’s degree holders transferring, or going straight into the workforce (or staying there), are as well prepared as they can be: This year’s COC graduates are competitive stock, hitting the highest GPA average in at least the past four years, at 3.35, as well as the most honors students, with 1,010 graduating with a 3.5 and above.
That includes students like 4.0 GPA holder Miguel Martinez, who told The Signal on his way to receive his degree that he’s heading into an accounting program — one of the most popular majors among COC graduates this year, with 203 in total — at California State University, Northridge.
Martinez said one of his favorite moments at COC was participating in the volunteer income tax assistance program.
“I was able to make some friends along the way, which I liked,” Martinez said. “I’d say I had a good time, I like my teachers, my classes.”
Andrea Escala, transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, said her time at COC was a vital part of her transition into working adulthood. She’s double majoring in communications and sociology to pursue social media advertising.
“I think I learned the most about myself over the past two years,” Escala said. “I think it also was a good stepping stone before going to university, just taking classes one by one, really solidifying like what I want to do.”
