Decreasing Enrollment, Virtual Classes Focus of Local News

Community colleges typically face a predictable calculus: Unemployment goes up, more people seek job training and affordable tuition, so enrollment rises. The economy improves, unemployment goes down, and enrollment drops.

But the coronavirus pandemic has broken all the rules. Despite high unemployment, Thomas Nelson and Tidewater community colleges are facing significant enrollment declines.

As of last week, enrollment was down 29% from last year at the Peninsula's community college. Curtis Aasen, vice president for information systems and institutional effectiveness at TCC, projected that enrollment will be down about 15% when fall classes start Monday.

Administrators across the region hope that new initiatives and programs, with a focus on digital learning, will leave institutions stronger.

"There's a lot of shift in the traditional college student and their consideration of a four-year school, especially in the Virginia commonwealth," said Susan English, vice president of academic affairs and workforce development at TNCC. "I think that the community colleges are really going to reap the benefits of that."

Tracking community college enrollment can be tricky, especially during the pandemic when TCC and TNCC pushed back tuition deadlines.

Students are enrolling later and later, administrators say, and it seems particularly true this year, according to English. The enrollment gap between this year and last will likely close.

"We really believe that everyone is kind of just waiting to see what's going to happen," English said. "Once we marketed and communicated our schedule, that's when students really started signing up."

The student body looks different at community colleges than at four-year schools. They're more likely to be the first in their family to go to college, to work full-time or to have children Elizabeth Yimer, TNCC's student government association president, said that for some of her friends and classmates, virtual learning just didn't work last spring.

"A lot of students saw last semester and they were really, really worried about learning online. It's not the preferred method of learning," said Yimer, who is completing an associate's degree in science. "Most students think of learning in an environment where there's other students to learn from."

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