The Covid-19 shutdown hit Zane State College right at the beginning of its spring break, which turned out to be fortunate. The timing allowed administrators to set out a list of the college’s 2,000 students and their phone numbers, divide it up among staff members, and call each one of them.
“The first thing we did is literally ask, ‘Hi, how are you?’” says Elizabeth Kline, the dean of arts and sciences and chief student-affairs officer. “‘What can we do to help you?’”
Zane State is a two-year institution in this rural and fairly depressed region of eastern Ohio, and its students can have significant needs.
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The Covid-19 shutdown hit Zane State College right at the beginning of its spring break, which turned out to be fortunate. The timing allowed administrators to set out a list of the college’s 2,000 students and their phone numbers, divide it up among staff members, and call each one of them.
“The first thing we did is literally ask, ‘Hi, how are you?’” says Elizabeth Kline, the dean of arts and sciences and chief student-affairs officer. “‘What can we do to help you?’”
Zane State is a two-year institution in this rural and fairly depressed region of eastern Ohio, and its students can have significant needs.
Some didn’t have internet connections. The college worked with a local service provider to get those students “hot spots,” a portable internet connection. Sometimes a student needed food, so the college arranged for contactless food pickups through a food pantry on campus. Sometimes a student required emotional support, so the college put a counselor on the line.
I stopped by the college on the way home from a road trip to Minnesota, wanting to know how a community college was handling a most unusual fall-enrollment season. Two-year institutions sometimes fare better during a recession, as people return to college for retraining, but they are also often on the front lines of higher education, serving a diverse and needy population.
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The national coronavirus crisis just might be an opportunity for places like Zane State.
As it turns out, Zane State seems to be seizing the moment, engaging in the sort of competition that we may see among numerous colleges this fall as they scramble to meet enrollment goals. Over the summer, Zane State was one of two community colleges in Ohio that saw an increase in its summer enrollment — a bump that Kline attributes in part to the college’s work toward retaining first-year students. This fall, Zane State will have in-person classes with masks and social distancing; some courses with higher enrollments will be split, with each half meeting part of the time online. The college has produced a guide for incoming students to help explain how the course configurations will work.
The in-person component attracts more than just college students. “We’re seeing an influx of high-school kids saying, If these high schools are going to do online learning again, I’m going to the community college instead because I want to be in person,” says Kline. “I cannot tell you how many students we’ve registered in just the past two weeks because of that.”
The national coronavirus crisis just might be an opportunity for places like Zane State. The college has rolled out a campaign encouraging students to stay near the “comfort of home” and enroll at Zane State instead of a small private college or a big state university, where classes might be mostly online anyway.
“Stay home. Stay safe. Stay on track,” says the campaign’s tagline. “Up until now, you might have planned to go away to a four-year college. You might be looking at things differently now. These are not ordinary times. … Start with us and finish at a four-year college.” The college has branded its own hand sanitizer, a project put together by chemistry students and faculty members.
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Chad M. Brown, the president of Zane State, says that even if the fall semester sees growth in enrollment, the college will have significantly higher expenses. He estimates that the college spent an additional $300,000 on hot spots and other urgent needs to keep the spring semester going. Classrooms in the fall will be filled to only half capacity, which could drive up costs from 50 to 100 percent, he says.
“Right now, there’s conversations suggesting we may have to deal with the social-distancing situation through 2022,” Brown says. “That’s a long way out to think about those additional costs and the impacts on the bottom line.”
‘A Huge Impact’
Enrollment surged at community colleges after the 2008 recession, but Brown doesn’t believe that two-year institutions will see the same kind of growth after this recession. During the last economic downturn, people got extended unemployment benefits and more help with Pell Grants, which allowed them to seek out retraining programs. But those programs are no longer in place. Disinvestment in public colleges in some states has continued — even accelerated — under Covid-19. Zane State has been on the receiving end of two $300,000 funding reductions since the start of the pandemic.
“In a period of 14 months, we’ve lost almost a million dollars in state funding,” says Brown. “For an operational budget that’s only $13 million, that’s a huge impact.” And recoveries carry their own hardships: Over the five years that Brown has been president, he and his colleagues have had to absorb some $5 million in budget reductions, to a great extent because adult students went back to work.
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For that reason, Brown has shifted the college’s focus toward traditional-age students straight out of high school. “We know who those students are,” and how to court them, he says. But because Covid-19 hit in the spring, during a crucial moment in the recruiting cycle, he lacks confidence that the strong enrollment numbers from the summer will hold up in the fall. “March, April, and May were our critical months — where we bring in the closer, so to speak, to win the game.”
However, conversations on the college’s Twitter feed and Facebook pages seem to indicate that many students would prefer a semester at less-expensive Zane State than at a more-expensive state or private college, college leaders say. Brown believes that students will have a better chance of building ties to an instructor at the two-year college because of its size and proximity to the local people who enroll here.
But community-college instructors are also a different breed from faculty members you might find at prestigious state institutions or private colleges, says Kline. Shifting to online learning came more naturally to community-college instructors, who often have to adapt to their students’ needs.
“I have faculty members holding virtual office hours at 9 or 10 o’clock at night, because that’s what works best for their students,” she says. “Find me a four-year university where a tenured faculty member is holding an office hour at 9 or 10 at night.”
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All colleges may need to adapt, Kline says, in the ways that community colleges have had to — reaching out to students and shifting the habits at the institution to accommodate them. The needs were clear in that first phone call after the shutdown.
“They’re not big on talking on the phone, and they wanted to talk, they wanted to be heard,” she says. “And now that we have heard them, the question is, What are we going to do about it?”