In mid-April, Virginia’s Tidewater Community College announced it would lay off 27 people in the wake of a steep drop in student enrollment. Earlier this spring, Brookdale Community College, a New Jersey institution, sent out an email asking employees to take a voluntary reduced work week or unpaid leave to help the school get through a difficult financial situation.
Layoffs and other signs of financial stress are evident at community colleges across the country. While the financial struggles of community colleges are nothing new, they pose a problem for many institutions, and can be expected to continue for the foreseeable future particularly as a number of states face ongoing budget shortfalls. Community colleges are often dependent on a combination of tuition and state funding, so when there is a lack of one or both, institutions suffer.
Experts say community college enrollments also tend to be countercyclical, rising and falling along with the economy. During times of economic stress, students turn to schools to gain new skills or wait out a bad job market. As more jobs open up, students return to the labor market.
Those trends held true in the most recent recession. After a surge of enrollments during the recession, starting around 2010 and 2011 community colleges began to see a drop in student enrollments across the country as the economy recovered.
“A lot of times when community college enrollments are really up is when the economy is really down,” says Dr. Scott Ralls, president of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA).
Ralls says his system has seen four to five years of declines in enrollment, but comparatively has not seen as precipitous a drop as other schools. Students at NOVA are also taking fewer classes at a time than they did during the recession, indicating that many are working and attending college at the same time.
“In northern Virginia we have a very hot job market and that helps out enrollment in some program areas,” Ralls says.
