Early enrollment numbers emerging on college campuses around the nation suggest the 2016-17 school year is helping institutions make headway on achieving many new goals that are products of efforts to weather damages from the prolonged national economic slump that began in 2008 paralleled by public policymakers’ retreat on supporting public higher education.
From California to New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and points in between, institution officials are cautiously sounding upbeat. Still, they hasten to add, it’s too early in the school year to make official declarations about this fall’s higher education enrollment experiences or how they might be impacting the overall picture of the post-recession era.
“…We’re seeing a small uptick,” says Adam Castro, vice president for enrollment management at Bloomfield College, a small private college in New Jersey whose multicultural student body is about 70 percent Pell Grant eligible each year.
Castro, who says Bloomfield’s enrollment has been “very stable” the last three years, credits his enrollment enthusiasm today with a small “uptick ” in the small institution’s enrollment of its largest freshman class—490 and growing—in its 148 year history.
In California, where the half-million students, 23-campus California State University System (Cal State) is opening its doors for the new school year, the institutions are still operating on enrollment caps mandated by the state legislature to control costs, despite overwhelming applications for admission.
Several Cal State campuses—Long Beach and Dominguez Hills—are seeing good developments, despite continued budget pressures.
Transfers from the state’s community colleges to historically four-year institutions are increasing, says Brandy McLelland, associate vice president of enrollment management at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which enrolls about 15,00 students each year. “We feel like we have rebounded” from the depths of the economic and enrollment slides, says McLelland.
