The Hechinger Report published a piece yesterday that analyzed the drop in community college enrollment. The report placed the blame on everything from bad advising for transfer students to COVID-19 to funding disparities. All or none of those things may be true, but community college enrollment has indeed dropped.
Community college enrollment peaked in 2010 under some extraordinary circumstances. In a way, it’s not fair to describe enrollment declines using 2010 as a benchmark. If not for the Great Recession, it is unlikely that community colleges would have enrolled more than 18M students.
Community colleges have notoriously bad advising. When I attended WCC, the full-time instructors provided student advising. And it worked out well enough. I wasn’t attempting to transfer credits anywhere, so I can’t talk about the quality of transfer advising. Programmatically, it wasn’t hard to figure out what classes I had to take to graduate. (It was harder to work around “required” courses that the college never seemed to offer.) Nonetheless, bad advising isn’t why 60% of students don’t ever graduate, or 40% of students leave after the first year. (Truthfully, you only get burned by bad advising after you’ve already transferred.)
COVID-19 emptied out the schools – no doubt. But students were leaving – or more likely – just not enrolling in the first place long before March 2020. That has nothing to do with state funding. The state appropriation makes up only about 20% of community college revenue. And when state funding gets cut, community colleges can raise tuition or ask for more operating funds. Further, community colleges benefited handsomely from the increasing property values. So, no. It wasn’t an alleged decrease in state funding.
Community college enrollment decline stems from administrative failures
The so-called reckoning that has arrived on community colleges’ doorsteps is really simple. Over the years, community college administrators have failed to recognize that they have competition. (Apparently, their Trustees have also failed to recognize that students have choices.)
In failing to recognize their non-exclusivity, community colleges have opened the doors to private, for-profit schools, trade unions, private colleges, public universities and the good old unwashed workforce. They’ve also failed to create competitive programs that would attract and retain students. In failing to do that, they’ve also ensured that their students would be unlikely to earn substantially more than a high school graduate who never earned a post-secondary degree.
When prospective students said, “Why bother?” community college administrators had no answers.
Declining community college enrollment is the result of lack of investment in instructional programs, program development, and academic facilities, as well as deliberate reductions in the number of full-time faculty members.
Don’t read “lack of investment” as lack of funds. The money was there, and if/when it wasn’t, community colleges had at least two other mechanisms to get more funding. The question is, “Where did the money go?” And I’m sure that if you took a survey of the college president and her 12 vice presidents, they would have no idea.
Photo Credit: Complete Interior Design , via Flickr
