Brad Love, Margaret Raber
Nearly half of all cancer diagnoses are attributable to modifiable risk factors, yet cancer prevention continues to underinvest in one of its most consequential life-course windows: early adulthood. Community college students represent a large and underserved population in this period who cluster cancer-relevant risk behaviors, including tobacco use, alcohol consumption, physical inactivity, and poor diet, while remaining largely invisible in prevention research and practice. Although community colleges enroll millions of students nationwide and disproportionately serve lower-income, racial and ethnic minority, and medically underserved populations, they are rarely treated as core prevention infrastructure. This debate paper argues that cancer prevention is missing a critical opportunity by failing to prioritize community colleges as settings for life-course intervention. We integrate epidemiologic, developmental, and prevention science evidence to advance three claims early adulthood is a uniquely malleable period for shaping trajectories of cancer risk; community colleges concentrate both modifiable risk and health inequities at population scale; and place-based prevention strategies offer a feasible pathway for intervening in under-resourced institutional environments where clinical prevention is limited. Drawing on implementation experience from the Be Well Baytown is the initiative -a community-embedded prevention program operating at Lee College is the community college, a Hispanic-Serving Institution in Baytown, Texas-we illustrate how community colleges can support multi-component, theory-driven cancer prevention efforts. We conclude that continued neglect of community colleges reflects not a lack of prevention promise but a failure of prevention prioritization. Aligning cancer prevention investment with where early-adult risk accumulates will require treating community colleges as essential components of prevention infrastructure.