Enrollment still climbing at Iowa community colleges

The combination of a floundering U.S. economy and a jobless recovery contributed to another jump in overall enrollment at Iowa's 15 community colleges this fall, state officials said Wednesday.

A record total of 106,597 full- and part-time students enrolled in community-college courses this school year, a 4.8 percent increase that marked the 14th consecutive yearly rise in the overall student population.

Tom Schenk Jr., educational program consultant with the state Department of Education, said this year's jump followed a 14 percent increase last year that was the second-largest rise since the community college system was started in 1965. For the third straight year, full-time students made up a majority of the students – 53,883 compared to 52,714 part-time enrollees, a trend that reflects a larger number of people returning to the classroom to upgrade their workforce skills in a tight economy that has fueled increases in unemployment.

Four of the community colleges – Iowa Western, Des Moines area, Eastern Iowa and Western Iowa Tech – posted double-digit enrollment gains while three others – Iowa Valley, Northeast and Southeastern – saw declines in the 4-5 percent range.

“It wasn't an across-the-board rise like we saw last year,” Schenk told members of the state Board of Education at their monthly meeting.

For the first time ever, Iowa community colleges are delivering more than 1 million credit hours, thanks in part to a 6.1 percent increase in credit hours since last year. The enrollment and credit hours data were boosted by a 7.1 percent jump in the number of “joint enrollee” high school students (now at 27,956) taking courses for college credit and a 5 percent increase in minority students attending community colleges – a change that Schenk described as “a pretty big swing.”

About 55 percent of the students attending Iowa's community colleges are females and more than 93 percent are Iowa residents, according to the latest enrollment report. Health science continues to be the leading career cluster at Iowa's community colleges, with a 507 percent jump from 2009 to 2010 to 14,489 students, followed by business management and administration, and manufacturing.

Because community college enrollments tend to be cyclical with economic conditions, Schenk said projections call for the number of enrolled students to drop by as much as 9 percent in the next school year.

“That's our best guesstimate,” he said. “Community colleges have been cautious about this huge enrollment increase knowing that this is not something that necessarily is going to be sustainable.”

The projected enrollment for next year stood at 103,290, which would be a 9.3 percent drop from this year's expected total but a 3.1 percent decline from the actual student count.

“They've been planning ahead and they're expecting a drop next year,” said Roger Utman, administrator of the department's division of community colleges and workforce preparation.

Utman also presented a report summarizing impacts that a 10 percent across-the-board cut in state funding last fiscal year had on the 15 community colleges.

In some cases, the enrollment increases and higher tuitions helped defray the affects of the lost state money. Also, several colleges used federal stimulus dollars and early-retirement incentives to balance their ledgers and virtually all the institutions implemented cost-cutting measures to freeze travel and pay, lay off employees, halt purchases, leave unfilled positions vacant, require unpaid furlough days, replace full-time faculty with adjunct instructors, and imposed a per-credit surcharge for the spring semester among other things.