Enrollment trends present challenge, opportunity for new Erie County Community College – GoErie.com
It will become the first state-chartered community college in 27 years when it opens in the fall, at the earliest, and one of the first in the nation in the last decade.
The officials charged with building the two-year Erie County Community College say they are at an advantage because they have the lessons from other institutions to learn from and will be better positioned to create a school geared for the future.
But they’re also working in challenging times when postsecondary enrollment at both four-year institutions and community colleges has been on a downward trajectory. These declines have only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the fall 2020 semester, college enrollment dropped 2.5%, or by about 400,000 students, according to The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s double the rate of decline as the fall 2019 semester, reported Inside Higher Education.
Worse, freshman enrollment at community colleges fell 13.1%, according to the NSCRC report.
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Founding Interim President Judith Gay said the pandemic has posed unique challenges when it comes to enrollment.
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“Community colleges have been particularly hard hit in terms of the pandemic for a number of reasons,” said Gay, who retired late last month as the vice president of strategic initiatives and chief of staff at the Community College of Philadelphia. “One of the reasons is that it has demonstrated the great disparity in access to education that we thought we were really solving by having open doors, but because everything went digital if you didn’t have digital access, if you didn’t have a computer, you didn’t have access to the internet, you were behind.”
Gay said a number of students were doing their online work at the college itself — not from home, or a library or someplace else.
“So when we closed, that cut off their access,” she said. “We have been down in enrollment. When we talk to students about why, why can’t you continue? What’s the problem? They say, ‘I can’t do online. I can’t do it with my children at home. I can’t do it with all the things that so many people were dealing with on top of all the other struggles they may have with finances and all of those things.’ So part of the enrollment problem is going to be that people are not as comfortable with online learning as we all probably think people are.”
Gay said those challenges will remain until the pandemic ends.
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But once it does Erie County Community College Board of Trustees Chairman Ron DiNicola believes the college will be perfectly situated to help a community that has long been underserved due to the lack of the type of affordable, accessible education that community colleges offer. The Erie economy, he said, will be able to rebound more quickly with the college in place.
“Generally, community college enrollment is inversely proportionate to the economy,” he explained. “If the economy is booming, then enrollment tends to go down. When the economy is struggling, enrollment tends to go up for, I think, obvious reasons. What we have here, though, is we have an added element and that’s a pandemic that has essentially destroyed socialization. Education is a socialization process, so that really gets in the way.
“When we work our way out of the pandemic and we have a return to normalcy then we’re going to see a spike in participation,” he continued. “And that’s very important for us because we know that we’re facing secondary school interruptions that are going to be lasting in the sense that some of our young people are not getting the continuity that they need and they’re having gaps in their educational opportunities.”
First-year enrollment is projected at 156 full-time students, 523 part-time students and 267 students enrolled in a workforce development program. The college would have a dozen full-time staff members and 87 part-time instructors.
Tuition is projected to be $145 per credit, with fees of $22 per credit.
The college hopes to seat its first class in the fall, but several things still need to occur before that happens, including receiving approval of a 120-day plan from the Department of Education and finding a temporary location, among others.
The 120-day plan requires the college to propose a degree program for approval.
The board, in consultation with the Department of Education, has proposed an associate of arts degree, which is the basis for most of the transfer pathways to a four-year college and which would be the general education core of other applied-degree programs.
Once the state approves that program, the Erie County Community College board will be able to create other degrees, certificates, and programs.
These are program pathways the college will eventually offer:
- Associate of arts
- Engineering and manufacturing
- Computer and information technology
- Business and entrepreneurship
- Liberal and creative arts
- Tourism and hospitality
- Math and science
- Human services
- Continuing education
The Pennsylvania Board of Education gave final approval to Erie County’s community college in July, more than three years after it was submitted. The inaugural seven-member Board of Trustees was appointed in September. Since then, they have secured a $10 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant from Gov. Tom Wolf, hired consultants to assist in the creation of the 120-day plan, retained a national search firm to find a permanent president and hired Gay as its interim.
In September, First Lady Jill Biden, while campaigning for her husband President Joe Biden, held a virtual round table with Erie officials on community college education, touting the then-candidate’s plan to provide free community college tuition to Americans.
DiNicola believes that Biden’s position on education will benefit the institution as it takes shape.
“We now have a national commitment to fund community college, to make community college free for Americans,” he said. “Now, whether that gets acted upon quickly or not, the commitment, I think, indicates that we’re seeing an appreciation at a larger level for the importance of this kind of education to the overall education scheme in this country.”
Contact Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNrink.