Posted on October 31 2011 by Sam Unwin

Once-surging PCC enrollment reversed course this fall

Southern Arizonans flocked to college to pick up new job skills during the recession. Now the tide appears to be turning.

After years of growth, Pima Community College and Cochise College each saw fewer students register for fall classes this year.

The local picture echoes a nationwide trend of declining enrollment at such institutions.

Community colleges, with their lower tuition rates and abundance of two-year programs, offer quicker and cheaper paths to career change than universities. Enrollment typically tends to surge during economic downturns.

“It really isn’t surprising,” to see numbers tapering off, said PCC Chancellor Roy Flores.

In recent years, he said, “we had people with university degrees, people in real estate, people in banking, coming to us. They had mortgages and families to feed, and they were out of work.

“Now those people have gone through the pipeline.”

Financially, the enrollment surge came at an awful time for colleges, just as the Legislature was slashing millions in state funding.

At PCC, state funding has plummeted from $26 million to $7 million, forcing an array of austerity measures, Flores said.

So declining enrollment actually comes as something of a relief.

“The college has to become smaller, with perhaps as many as 10 percent fewer students over the next two years,” Flores said early this year in a “chancellor’s message” on PCC’s website.

Having fewer students would help the college “remain financially stable,” Flores said.

“We simply cannot sustain the number of students we have in the past.”

PCC has two ways of counting students, by headcount – the number of people taking classes – and by full-time student equivalents, where, for example, every two half-time students count as one full-timer.

In 2009, the increase in full-time equivalents reached double-digits, surging 12.3 percent over 2008.

Even as overall enrollment drops at PCC, there are long lineups for popular programs such as nursing, which has a three-year waiting list.

At Cochise College, which has campuses in Douglas and Sierra Vista, total enrollment fell by 9 percent this fall – a turnaround from recent years when increases ranged from 8 to 12 percent.

The University of Arizona has not seen similar spikes in enrollment during the recession, said Kasey Urquidez, assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of admissions.

This year’s total fall enrollment is virtually unchanged from last year. There are 39,236 UA students this year, 150 more than in fall 2010.

By the numbers

After several years of growth spurred by recession, enrollment is down this fall at Pima Community College. Student headcounts for fall semesters are as follows:

2006 30,901

2007 31,426 +1.7%

2008 32,605 +3.8%

2009 34,360 +5.4%

2010 35,365 +2.9%

2011 33,852 -4.3

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