Kirkwood reports summer enrollment rebound, prospect of strong fall

CEDAR RAPIDS — After years of declining or stagnant enrollment, aggravated by the 2020 pandemic, Kirkwood Community College is reporting a summer rebound and encouraging signs for a strong fall showing.

“We started earlier this year with orientations, and so that gave us a nice jump ahead,” Kirkwood research analyst Becky Weininger told the community college’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday about projected fall enrollment and efforts to increase it.

As of July 8 — about seven weeks before classes start Aug. 26 — Kirkwood’s fall enrollment head count of 8,155 was trending 2.8 percent ahead of last summer, while its 75,644 credit-hour count was 3.5 percent ahead of the same point last year.

“We’re only cautiously optimistic at this point because we still have a big part of that to go,” Weininger told trustees about the time left before school starts.

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Weininger flagged a “mountain we have to climb” over the next eight weeks until the official fall enrollment count is taken two weeks after classes commence.

Still, after COVID dragged down both summer and academic-year enrollment in 2020 and the years following, Kirkwood is angling toward a rebound in both categories.

“Our summer enrollment is looking really great right now,” Weininger said.

To date, 4,338 total students are taking Kirkwood classes this summer — up 10 percent over both last year’s 3,940 and the 3,952 in 2022.

High-school bump

Although much of that summer total is traditional Kirkwood students — at 3,920 — the biggest percentage increase is coming from high school students earning college credits.

Enrollment of those students — capitalizing on Kirkwood’s partnership with local school districts to earn credit toward their high school diploma and college degree — reached 418 as of July 8. That’s more than double last summer’s 206 and up 78 percent over 2022.

“You can see that there's a big lift, and so that's really exciting,” Weininger said of the enrollment increases. “And what I love about it is that it's both of our college-credit-in-high-school students and our regular enrollment students.”

The number of credit hours those students are taking is on a similar upward trajectory — increasing 8.3 percent overall from last year, with high schoolers taking 29 percent more summer credit hours this year than last.

“That’s really exciting, considering we've had a lot of decline in prior years,” Weininger told trustees.

COVID impact

While summer and fall projections seem to be trending in the right direction, neither numbers have restored Kirkwood’s enrollment to pre-COVID levels — like in 2018, when Kirkwood’s overall summer head count was 4,768, about 10 percent above this summer’s.

Where last fall’s total enrollment reached 12,662 — up from 2022 and trending ahead of that this year — it was below the 14,814 count in 2015 and well below Kirkwood’s peak post-recession enrollment of 18,456 in 2010.

The area that has seen consistent growth, however, is concurrent high school enrollment — with those summer students surging from 57 in 2018 to today’s 418.

“When we look at how this has affected our academic year enrollment, what we're seeing is that we have now reached 2.2 percent above 2023,” Weininger said.

Financial aid

To a trustee’s question of whether complications with an update to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid has impacted Kirkwood enrollment, Student Services Vice President Melissa Payne said she doesn’t think so — but her team has had to do a lot of legwork and phone work to prevent that.

“We realize that there's a lot of information that our students don't have, and our phone call volume has increased significantly, with folks asking questions about some of the basic things — have I done everything in order to get my student loan in place? When will I be able to get a return check for this grant that I've received?” Payne said.

“So while it hasn't impacted our enrollment in a way we understand, it's definitely impacting the student's onboarding experience.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com