As enrollments soar, some colleges offer round-the-clock classes — and still run out of space
As the economy spirals downward, community colleges face what one president calls “a tsunami of students” that many institutions don’t have space to accommodate, especially at peak times and in high-demand programs.
Colleges are scrambling to respond — by scheduling courses whenever they have empty classrooms, including early mornings and weekends, and by adding online course sections. Even so, many students find that the classes they want to take are full.
At LaGuardia Community College, in New York, enrollment of first-time freshmen for the spring semester was a striking 18 percent higher than it was last year. “I’m going to have a damned time trying to find spaces to put them in,” says the president, Gail O. Mellow, who says the 50,000-student institution is already using its classrooms Friday nights and all day Saturdays and Sundays. She has started scheduling 6 a.m. courses because that’s a time when the college’s scheduling grid shows empty rooms. (The classes are popular with baggage handlers coming from overnight shifts at LaGuardia Airport, she says.)
Community-college presidents like Ms. Mellow worry that the students being shut out may be those to whom the institutions have long been the most committed — low-income students and first-generation college-goers who may be less aggressive than others about signing up for courses as soon as registration opens.
And as big as this academic year’s growth has been — 9.7 percent at Norwalk Community College, in Norwalk, Conn.; 11 percent at Howard Community College, in Columbia Md.; 10 percent at Mid-South Community College, in West Memphis, Ark.; 10 percent at Cuyamaca College, in Rancho San Diego, Calif. — federal student-aid increases included in the $787-billion stimulus package are likely to boost demand even more.
The demand is driven in part by people who need retraining because they have lost their jobs — or fear losing them — and in part by recent high-school graduates who turn to community colleges because they can’t afford state or private colleges. Enrollment caps at budget-stressed state institutions have also led more students to community colleges.
States’ dire budget situations are further complicating efforts to cope with the enrollment spike. While the colleges may benefit eventually from construction money in the stimulus package, planning and constructing new buildings takes a minimum of 18 months, and often much longer. In the meantime, many two-year colleges that would lease commercial space or bring in modular classrooms if they could afford it are instead laying off employees in response to state spending cuts.
“When the economy started to go down, our enrollments started growing robustly,” says J. Noah Brown, president of the Association of Community College Trustees. Now, he says, “just at the moment when our country needs the community-college system, we’re just stressed out and impeded from doing what we can do so well.”
Norma G. Kent, vice president for communications at the American Association of Community Colleges, says, “We’re dancing as fast as we can.”
LaGuardia, for instance, has booked courses into every available conference room, lounge, and computer lab, Ms. Mellow says, but space shortages remain, particularly for biology labs. The labs are crucial components of many of the health-sciences programs that are in high demand everywhere because health-related employment remains strong despite the downturn. Safety is an important constraint in labs, which are designed for no more than 20 students so that faculty members can supervise them appropriately. And because labs need specialized ventilation, they’re costly and time-consuming to build.
Another issue Ms. Mellow and other community-college presidents face is how to balance academic offerings with those oriented toward retraining people who have lost their jobs. Many community colleges, Ms. Mellow says, “fill their rooms first with credit students and then fill in noncredit students in the extra space.” But she doesn’t want LaGuardia to turn away people seeking noncredit retraining classes “and not give them any hope.”
Using classrooms for courses almost around the clock also means that the college cannot provide space for other community functions, she adds, despite a long tradition of doing so.
At Northern Virginia Community College, which offers classes on five campuses in the Washington suburbs, “we were geared up to grow 4.5 percent this year, but it looks like it’s going to be double that,” says Robert G. Templin Jr., the president. “Almost anything we offer, almost any time that we offer it, is snatched up very quickly.”
That’s partly because the region’s high schools are graduating their largest classes ever, he says, but also because “between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, families came to grips with the fact that their savings for college had evaporated, and the equity they had in their houses was gone.” Many families are now re-evaluating how to finance higher education. “A significant number of students who started the fall at a university have come back home for the spring semester,” he says. “We’re shifting to a much younger population.”
That has implications for facility planning. “Typically our students had been students part time and had worked full time,” Mr. Templin says. “Now they’re full-time students, and they come to campus and they stay.” That’s a problem because the college doesn’t have much in the way of hanging-out space. In bad weather, he says, so many students end up crowding the hallways that it can be hard to move around.
After the state shaved its contribution to the college by $8-million, he says, the college cut 45 staff positions. At the same time, it’s looking for 15 new faculty members to handle the flood of additional students and is seeking space to lease. “We have about $200-million of new space under construction right now, but we can’t bring it online fast enough,” Mr. Templin says.
Some classes on the college’s Annandale campus meet in trailers, but those are too costly to rely on at a time when the state is cutting back its support. The college used to schedule evening classes in local high schools, but demand is rising for classes during the day, when the high schools are in use.
Northern Virginia has no way of knowing how many students cannot register for courses they want to take. In part that is because community-college students “don’t call the legislature the way state-university students do” when they can’t get into courses they need, the president says.
The college tries to reserve its face-to-face courses for credit-seeking students and to provide more online courses — “on-demand, short-burst” courses, Mr. Templin calls them — for adult learners. Many faculty members already offer hybrid courses, which mix in-person and online components, but the college can’t count on hybrid classes to free up classroom space, because administrators have not yet set standards that tell faculty members what proportion of such courses must be online. A third kind of course — for which the college contracts with companies to teach — is offered at workplaces whenever possible, he says.
The three colleges of the San Diego Community College District, which is working its way through a multiyear, $1.55-billion capital-projects plan, have space enough for more students than they can afford to admit, given state-budget cuts. With spring enrollment up 8 percent from this time last year, 7,000 students were not able to get classes they wanted. But the problem was a shortage of state money, not classrooms, says David Umstot, vice chancellor for facilities management. On the other hand, the economic downturn is drastically reducing the district’s construction costs, he says. Several projects put out for bids last June cost about 80 percent of what the district had estimated. Two projects put out for bids even more recently cost just two-thirds of what had been anticipated.
In Arizona, too, some two-year institutions are more crowded than others, says Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the 10-institution Maricopa Community College District, which serves a county of nearly four million people. The district is also in the middle of a multiyear capital-projects effort, so its campuses are for the most part not overflowing, even though some have seen enrollment increases as high as 14 percent. The district includes one all-online institution, Rio Salado College, which offers new course sections every week and has seen a 22-percent enrollment increase in the past year, according to Karen Mills, vice president for teaching and learning. The college has about 31,000 online students now, she says, and its computer servers still have plenty of space left — the course-management system was designed for up to 100,000 students.
What does worry Mr. Glasper, he says, is a “maintenance-of-effort” provision in the stimulus package that would deny money to districts that let their education spending drop below 90 percent of what they had spent previously. In Arizona’s case, the state’s economic woes could end up triggering the provision. “That’s the big question for all of us right now,” he says.
At LaGuardia, President Mellow faces a similar problem: New York State law prevents community colleges from building unless the local government matches the state’s contribution. And even though the state could funnel stimulus money to the college for construction, New York City has no matching funds to kick in.
Certainly community colleges can use all the stimulus money they can get. Mr. Brown, of the Association of Community College Trustees, points out that because “a majority of our campuses were built in the 1960s and 70s, a significant share of our infrastructure is aged out.” A rough calculation that the association provided to the Obama administration as it prepared the stimulus package, he notes, showed that the nation’s community colleges have a backlog of $100-billion in deferred maintenance. And that calculation, he adds, is conservative.
http://chronicle.com Section: Diversity in Academe Volume 55, Issue 29, Page B11
