Community college enrollment in Minnesota has faced a steady decline over the past decade, but new data provided by Minnesota State Colleges and Universities reveal that enrollment declined further during the pandemic — with a decrease in enrollment by 5 percent last fall as opposed to the average fall-to-fall decrease of 1.7 percent.
This decline is aligned with a national decline in community college enrollment, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that releases biannual data on higher education. The report found that community college enrollment was down 11.3 percent in the spring, almost double that of the decline in undergraduate enrollment at 5.9 percent.
In a press release from the organization, Executive Director Doug Shapiro said, “The continuing slide in community college enrollments is of great concern. In a sign of potentially long-lasting impact on the level of skills and credentials in the workforce, there is still no age group showing increases at community colleges, even after a full year of pandemic and related unemployment.”
An outdated correlation
In the past, community college enrollment increased during times of economic uncertainty, but Kay Frances-Garland, the dean of strategic enrollment at Saint Paul College, says this correlation no longer exists.
“There was a time when community colleges had an inverse relationship with the economy. The economy’s up, enrollments down; economy’s down, enrollments up. Well, we’re in a new norm. That’s not necessarily the case,” she said.
Doug Anderson, the director of communications and media at Minnesota State, says the decline in enrollment is driven by a number of factors.
“The pandemic is one of them, but it’s also being driven by economic and demographic issues that have been impacting our colleges and universities for a period of several years,” he said.
Although Anderson pointed to a decline in graduating seniors and the prior economic recovery as reasons for a decrease in enrollment, he also emphasized that “the decrease of the past year has been greater than what we’ve seen in prior years.”
Data provided to MinnPost from various community colleges across the state confirm the trend. Student enrollment was down 13 percent at Saint Paul College compared to being down 6 percent in enrollment the previous year. At Minneapolis College enrollment was down 11.5 percent this spring.
“We absolutely believe the pandemic caused a drop in enrollment this year; we just couldn’t say how much of that 13% decrease was specifically because of it,” said Ryan Mayer, the executive director of marketing and communications at Saint Paul College.
[image_credit]Saint Paul College[/image_credit][image_caption]Student enrollment was down 13 percent at Saint Paul College compared to being down 6 percent in enrollment the previous year.[/image_caption]Some students impacted harder than others
Approximately 50 percent of the state’s community college students are enrolled in colleges in the metro area, of which a large population of the student body includes students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.
“I do believe that underserved populations have been impacted harder than other populations,” said Anderson.
Heidi Aldes, the dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, also known as Minneapolis College, says that the pandemic has put added financial pressure on students.
“Some students can’t afford to not work right now,” said Aldes, “and it’s hard to go to school when you have to work. So I think financial hardship is the most significant impact.”
The student body at Minneapolis College is particularly vulnerable to economic fallout of the pandemic, with 72 percent of students eligible for financial aid.
“The students that we serve include a 10 percent homeless population and students that struggle with homelessness, students struggling with housing insecurity, and an even greater population struggle with food insecurity,” said Aldes. “So it’s hard to be successful in the classroom when you’re trying to survive in life.”
Distant learning a deterrent
Aldes says Minneapolis College focused on offering students financial alleviation, but for some students the switch to online classes was another deterrent.
“Zoom fatigue is a real thing, and certainly our high school students experienced it,” said Aldes, who noted that the largest decrease in enrollment at the college was amongst new students. “Recent graduates from high school went from completely face-to-face engaged learning to all of a sudden pivoting to online learning without folks having the time to really build an online learning skill set. And that is overwhelming and difficult.”
Frances-Garland said students had similar sentiments at St. Paul College, where the administration conducted a phone campaign to check in on students who expressed discomfort with online classes. “So the online shift from in-person to Zoom made them uncomfortable and we encouraged them to hang on, but we did have a number of students withdraw,” she said. “The numbers wouldn’t say that it was a vast increase of withdrawal, but we know that probably some students would have withdrawn anyway.”
Data provided by Saint Paul College identified that the largest decline in student enrollment was among Black and Asian students, where enrollment was down 13 and 19 percent respectively, compared to being down 11 percent among white students; these three are the largest demographic groups at St. Paul College, making up 73 percent of the student body.
A different picture at RCTC
While most colleges across the state saw a decline, enrollment at Rochester Community and Technical College remained flat and increased among Black and Latinx students.
[image_caption]Jefferey Boyd[/image_caption]
Nationally, data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that enrollment was down by 30 percent among first-year students who identified as either Black, Hispanic or Native American.
Boyd believes that remaining partially open through the pandemic was a factor in the rise in enrollment among Black and Latinx students.
“We kind of remained open in that we provided laptops and we provided computer labs. And what I noticed is that most of the students coming in for those services were students of color,” said Boyd. “I think a lot of folks just assume that everyone could just access online education and register everything online. But the most vulnerable students really don’t. They didn’t adjust to that as quickly as probably others.”
[image_credit]Rochester Community and Technical College[/image_credit][image_caption]While most colleges across the state saw a decline, enrollment at Rochester Community and Technical College remained flat and increased among Black and Latinx students.[/image_caption]
“I think by having our doors open and earlier than most campuses, I think even in Minnesota, we never really closed as far as that goes, so I think that helped us,” Boyd said.
Retention initiatives
As most schools look to open in the fall, Doug Anderson at Minnesota State says a number of retention initiatives are taking place to help students remain enrolled, including emergency grants, food delivery and mental health services.
But as schools return to a post-pandemic normal, one thing is certain: The old rules don’t apply.
“With the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, you would have expected to see enrollment go up, but it didn’t,” said Boyd. “And it’s continued its decline.”
I’d think they would have done better.
CC’s are a good deal for basic classes instead of paying too much at a private college.
Maybe these folks are going to trade schools, which might be a better choice.
In Minnesota, community colleges ARE trade schools. The vo-techs and the community college systems were merged urats ago.
St. Paul College has machine tool, carpentry, electrical, automotive, auto body repair, diesel, and other trades offered.
College enrollment saw steep declines from students who either needed to work or decided against online learning. The most selective colleges were fine, they always have plenty of candidates to choose from. The less selective schools saw declines of up to 15% due to the drop in demand. After 2024 we will enter a decade of declining numbers of graduating seniors, especially in the Midwest.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/06/high-school-graduates-drop-number-and-be-increasingly-diverse
Would you have enrolled in an online only auto body repair program?
MN community colleges are expensive and the instructors are less than ideal, often poorly paid adjuncts. They are cheaper than “expensive private schools,” but so is practically every other way to spend a few hours a week.
I would absolutely have to disagree with the claim that “Minnesota, community colleges ARE trade schools.” They certainly were an attempt at trades training, but they haven’t come close to keeping up with the changes in trades’ training. And teaching subjects like “machine tool, carpentry, electrical, automotive, auto body repair, diesel” are great examples of buggy whip thinking. Machinists became obsolete in the early years of CAD and CNC equipment, in the 80s, and the people who lucked into retiring from that trade by the 90s were the last machinists to see a decent return on their training investment. “Electrical” is better taught and served by the union trade schools, which last I saw, Cities unions were offering free schooling followed by the required union apprenticeships; same for plumbing. There is a huge demand for modern car repair techs, but the salaries and working conditions haven’t caught up to the demand so those jobs are either unfilled or filled by grossly unqualified employees. Diesel is almost as historic a trade as horse shoeing.
The real problems are: #1 the educational requirements for MN community college instructors is unrealistic as is the salary. Anyone good enough to be a current technology instructor is too talented and in demand to put up with academic politics and low starting salary. The schools try to get around that by offering weird crap like bicycle design and repair, furniture carpentry, hobbyist welding, and the obsolete subjects described above. #2 community college is too expensive to allow for an undecided approach to getting into higher education, which is how most of the previous generation of educated people found their way into their careers. Community college has gone from less than $100 per semester to$4,000 or more in my lifetime. A kid might experiment with biology, math, construction, welding, machine tools, foreign languages, history, and science on a low budget, but when thousands of dollars are on the line experimenting with “what I might like” isn’t practical for most of the people who need that resource.
Pricing people out of entering community colleges (and to a lesser extent, state universities) undecided and thereby limiting experimentation is a huge problem with the current system. It’s asking students to make a huge life decision by high school graduation.
The price also forces people to stick with a decision they regret (unless they flunk out of the program) as changing majors is now incredibly costly. This is unfortunate because as you allude to, past students were able to change their minds after starting college, which is in part due to being presented options they might not have previously known existed.
To be clear, I’m not advocating that students dabble in everything and never commit, but a lot of successful people would not have been had they stuck with a decision they made when they were 17.
Boyd at RCTC makes a good point that his school might have had better retention because they kept the computer labs available and provided laptops. Especially for students in precarious financial situations like those at MCTC that the article mentions, good enough wifi access at home isn’t something you can take for granted. During the pandemic when campuses and libraries and even coffee shops were closed, I’m sure some students simply could not take classes online.
Ask the real question for why costs at Community & Technical colleges has gone up so much (hint: it’s the same reason as at the public universities in MN, including the University of Minnesota). Public investment in public higher education cratered in the 90’s and has never come back from it. Unfortunately, too many people think “their tax dollars” are paying for everything at these schools (whether they’re a 2 or a 4 year institution) when the actual public investment is nowhere near what it was in the 70’s & 80’s.
And people have been selling CC as a cheaper way to get your general education requirements out of the way for decades, but that’s only true if those credits transfer cleanly. (good luck forcing those private schools to accept those credits if they don’t want to!)
But at the end of the day, the disinvestment in public higher education by the legislature over the past 30 years has come home to roost.
All higher education is hurting right now because of the pandemic (excepting for the most elite schools who turn away students annually); online education is not what most students want from a college experience.
As you probably know, technical colleges in Minnesota were free to high school graduates until about 1980. They were connected to their school districts and as such were responsive to the needs of their local residents. Several very good high school tech-ed instructors told me that knowing free training in something they were interested in was on the horizon was their only real motivation for finishing high school.
Regarding Community College transfer credits, some very specific pathways to credits transferring to the U of M (like engineering) did exist, but you had to get the grades — and good luck transferring the credits if you opted to change your major. (Yeah, can you believe some high school graduates might change their minds?)
The recession of the early 1990s prompted even champions of public education (like Gov. Carlson) to cut funding to higher-ed to balance the state budget, since universities could raise their own revenue through tuition. Unfortunately, instead being a one-time emergency policy, it became the standard operating procedure for most states.
At the federal level, loan limits were lifted under the pretense of helping current students graduate (which was true at the time, but should not have continued). With that, “marketplace” of higher-ed began, with colleges and universities “fighting” for the dollars attached to every student. Tuition began to rise and instead of higher-ed being important to society as part of an engaged and informed public, higher-ed was considered a private individual good — and put a premium on ROI (return on investment) — thereby causing resentment of college students who studied anything that couldn’t immediately be monetized.
Not to mention that all the loan funding that was up for grabs ended up at for-profit schools that essentially scammed students. The economics 101 argument here is that monetary incentives would result in the proliferation of for-profit schools recruiting students, taking their loan money, and not giving a dang if they graduated (with the unacredited, worthless degree they offered).
All of this is the long way to agree with your major point that disinvestment in higher education for the past 30 years has come home to roost.