Page 32 - BusinessWest December 8, 2021
P. 32

  Education
A Stern Test Continues
Community Colleges Face Falling Enrollment, Questions About the Future
For the area community’s colleges, the enrollment numbers continue to fall, with annual declines recently in the double digits. There are many reasons for these declines, which actually started well before COVID but were greatly exacerbated by the pandemic. With many students and potential students now in a state of what one college president called “paralysis,” there are hard-to-answer questions about what ‘normal’ will be like moving forward.
IBy George O’Brien
t’s been a while since anyone has talked about park- ing at Springfield Technical Community College — or the lack thereof.
John Cook, the school’s president, sometimes yearns for the days when they did.
And that was most days. Indeed, going back decades, parking was a problem at this urban campus that sits on the site of the Springfield Armory, despite numerous efforts to add more. By the time Cook arrived in 2017, the school was still parking cars on the commons (the old parade grounds converted by the school into athletic fields) the first few days of classes to make sure all students had a space. That practice was no longer necessary after a new lot was built near the Pearl Street entrance in 2019.
These days, there’s plenty of space in that lot and all the others as enrollment at the school continues a downward tra- jectory, a pattern seen at the other community colleges in the area — one that is defying many of the patterns concerning these schools and the economy, but one that was already in evidence before the pandemic and only accelerated by it.
Indeed, since STCC saw enrollment hit its high-water mark just after the Great Recession of 2008, roughly 7,000 stu- dents, the numbers have been declining steadily to the pres- ent 4,000 or so.
“We were down 16 or 17% last year, and this fall, we were down another 10%,” said Cook, adding that this pattern has been seen at other schools as well, with COVID-19 adding an exclamation point to the problem. At Holyoke Community College, for example, enrollment saw another double-digit decline in 2021, and President Christina Royal said that, with just six weeks to the start of the spring semester, the numbers are down another 7% or so from this time last year.
While most all colleges are seeing enrollment declines at this time, community colleges are being especially hard-hit, in large part because the students who attend these schools,
 Springfield Technical Community College President John Cook
  32 DECEMBER 8, 2021
EDUCATION
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