By re-thinking how to reach new students, Oregon Coast CC sees strong post-pandemic turnaround in 2021 enrollment

 

By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com

The coronavirus has taken huge bites out of Oregon’s coastal economy, affecting everything from restaurants and hotels to stores and child care availability.

Less visible, but no less profound, was the hit taken by Oregon Coast Community College, which saw its enrollment numbers plummet from 939 full-time equivalent students before the pandemic to 516 in 2020 – a drop of 45 percent.

Now, however, new enrollment figures are indicating that aggressive steps the college has taken the past year to reverse that trend are working. Although total enrollment is still down about 13 percent from pre-pandemic levels, numbers for 2021 are actually up 59 percent from fall 2020 registration.

The 13 percent figure compares with the average drop of 24 percent for all 17 of Oregon’s community colleges.

College President Birgette Ryslinge said she thinks the multi-faceted approach administrators took to address plunging enrollment numbers have helped turn things around.

“This was obviously a novel situation for all of us,” she said. “And very quickly, we realized there was no handbook on how to deal with this.”

Administrators, in assessing the initial drop, calculated that many potential students took a look at the massive shift to online classes brought about by the pandemic and said, no thanks.

So they came up with a plan that would still include online offerings but, with COVID-19 vaccines helping lead the way, enable students to return to the on-campus classes they seemed to prefer.

“We wanted those people back,” said Dave Price, vice president of engagement and entrepreneurship. “Doing all that required a ton of work by our student affairs folks, but I thought what they came up with was genius.”

The “handbook” they devised includes elements such as:

• Geofencing: A marketing tool that let the college send OCCC ads to people who willingly installed a special app on their cell phones. It let them, for instance, send pro-OCCC ads to every single student who graduated from Lincoln County’s high schools.
• Social media: “Not too many years ago, community colleges would be marketing themselves on Facebook,” Price said. “But students coming out of high school these days have walked away from that, saying that’s where their grandparents are. So we have moved with students to sites like Snapchat and TikTok. It’s where they are right now.”
• Print media: Price said he is not sure how many younger people read newspapers these days, but the college nonetheless bought large enough ads in The Newport News-Times to have the publication then also affix a special sticky note to the front page of every paper. The note, which could be peeled off and stuck on a refrigerator or car dashboard, advertised the new one-stop college admissions process OCCC introduced this year.
• One-stop enrollments: Students looking to enroll, even if they had made no prior contact of any type, could arrive on campus, meet with an academic adviser, have their transcripts reviewed, make an academic plan, register for classes and then walk down the hall to confer with a financial-aid coordinator.
• Virtual assistance: Potential students who could not make an in-person visit to campus could chat by computer with financial aid specialists. “It provided the exact same experience as if they’d showed up on our Newport campus, with no travel needed,” Price said.
• Mobile hot spots: Knowing that broadband is not available in some parts of the county, OCCC set up mobile hot spots and distributed lap tops to students who could not afford them.

Taken together, the elements of the plan seem to be working, Ryslinge said.

She noted that the career technical education programs OCCC specializes in, such as nursing and health offerings, along with welding and early childhood education, are nearly full.

“We are only successful to the extent that our students are successful,” Ryslinge said. “The enrollment drops we saw were truly cause for grave concern. It’s very heartening, obviously, to see a lot of that coming back.”

Statewide picture not as rosy

Overall, Oregon’s 17 community colleges have managed to slow steep pandemic drops in enrollment according to the latest figures released last week, but their future is uncertain. Last year, the total statewide student headcount was down 23 percent from the year before. This year, it slowed to a drop of less than 1 percent.

Still, community colleges enroll 60,000 fewer students today than they did a decade ago – a 40 percent drop – as Oregon’s population has grown.

There are three central reasons for this decline.

One is that in 2012, the country was coming out of an economic recession that had driven many adults back into community colleges for training that could lead to new jobs. Many people had been laid off, wanted to learn new skills and earn more money.

The second reason for the decline is that as the economy in the state improved and more jobs were available, fewer people enrolled in community colleges. Between 2012 and 2019, the enrollment dropped by about 2 percent each year, ostensibly because more people could, once again, make good money at a job that didn’t require the training and the tuition.

The third reason for the steep drop: Coronavirus. Classes went online last year but tuition remained stable. Many students uninterested in paying full freight for remote classes, or the many adult students who were already working on top of school, opted out of community college classes.

Overall, community college enrollment in Oregon is down about one-fourth from pre-pandemic levels. At four-year schools, it’s down about 5 percent, but some institutions have fared better. Oregon State University reported record enrollment this fall.

Cam Preus, executive director for the Oregon Community College Association, said that during the last couple decades there’s also been a reframing of priorities when it comes to enrollment that might have contributed to some declines.

“Two decades ago we just talked about access,” she said. “Now we talk about access, and retention, progression, completion.”

Despite seeing somewhat steady declines in the aftermath of the Great Recession, “no one anticipated the drop we had from covid,” she said.

She said the Great Recession was about accommodating growth. Now, community colleges are accommodating a massive contraction, and a decline in the state’s overall number of high schoolers down the line.

“If you look at the high school population in Oregon, once you get to 2025, it goes down. We aren’t gonna have as many high school graduates. And the competition among two- and four- year institutions will be fiercer than it is now,” she said.

As for whether these declines could lead to the closure of some community colleges in the future, “We can’t preclude those conversations,” she said. “I don’t want to say we’ve never thought about it or wouldn’t think about it.”

• Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com
• Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle contributed to this report.