Boom time for two-year degrees

At Norwalk Community College last month, Gov. M. Jodi Rell helped break ground on a new health and science center.
She may just want to hang onto that shovel a while yet.

With community colleges bursting at the seams across Connecticut, administrators are pushed up against physical and financial capacity constraints as they deal with record enrollments. The mass influx of students is a function of large classes of high school graduates; expensive tuitions at four-year colleges driving some to cheaper community colleges; a recession that has driven some to get additional qualifications as they wait for businesses to resume hiring; and a take-all-comers policy in recognition of the role they play for their communities and companies needing skilled workers.

Community colleges handled the increases with 130 fewer people in their employment ranks than they original expected, with budge cuts worrying some policymakers that colleges may have to cut corners in their core mission of preparing students for the work force.

Last December, U.S. Rep. John Larson of Hartford introduced the Community College Emergency Stabilization Act to provide $700 million to schools nationally to help them hire faculty to handle the surge in enrollment, among other goals.

Community college enrollments could zoom higher still, if Connecticut sees a large number of takers for a new program that would allow teens to skip their last two years of high school and enroll in community or technical colleges after their sophomore years.

 

The crush of new students is particularly pronounced in Fairfield County, which is served by just two of Connecticut”™s dozen community colleges ”“ NCC and Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport ”“ despite being home to a quarter of the state”™s population.

 

Housatonic Community College added a new academic and student building in 2008, which helped it to absorb a 13 percent increase in students last fall, second statewide behind only Middlesex Community College.

Still, when it came time for the state to commit big bucks to the community college system ”“ nearly $200 million ”“ it chose to spend the money on a new campus for dated Gateway Community College in New Haven, rather than contemplating the creation of an entirely new college in Fairfield County to help accommodate demand.

While an expensive proposition, cities elsewhere have considered new colleges to accommodate demand ”“ most relevantly in New York City, where City University of New York approved last year the creation of a new community college in addition to six it already runs.

Connecticut”™s community colleges are operating under “extraordinary enrollment increases and budgetary challenges,” in the words of Vicki Greene, chief financial and administrative officer of the system.

Preliminary estimates show a double-digit increase in students for the spring semester, exceeding the whopping 7.8 percent jump last fall that saw more than 55,000 students enrolling in community colleges, including some 21,400 full-timers.

Greene said colleges had expected a 3 percent increase, and made the conscious decision to accommodate as many students as possible, though some would-be students were turned away due to concerns of being able to accommodate them, both from the point of view of physical premises as well as service capacity.

If anything, Connecticut has had an easier time of it than peers nationally, according to a survey of nearly 350 schools last December by the American Association of Community Colleges, including 21 in New England.

AACC researchers said enrollment jumped 11.7 percent on average nationwide last fall, while full-time enrollment increased an incredible 24 percent between the fall of 2007 and the fall of 2009.