Students walk through Southern Oregon University’s campus Wednesday. [Jamie Lusch / Mail Tribune]
Southern Oregon University and Rogue Community College are reporting slightly more students despite enrollment declining 1% for all public institutions in the state over the past year.
Fall term figures show SOU gained 100 students, from 5,056 last fall to 5,156 this year, while RCC gained 806 students, from 3,619 to 4,245, according to data released early this week by the Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
“I’m very proud of our institution for the efforts we’ve made to experience an incline in enrollment, however slight,” RCC President Randy Weber said.
Neil Woolf, SOU’s vice president of enrollment management and student affairs, said he is pleased with the Ashland institution’s enrollment, saying it’s the second academic year in a row headcount has grown.
“Very happy,” Woolf said. “What we’ve actually done is increased our prospective student pool. Our team has done a really good job in adding virtual recruitment, including texting with students.”
The number of SOU students enrolled in enough credits to be considered “full time” declined by 57 students, from 3,321 to 3,264.
“Students, in general, are taking less courses. Some many be enrolled part time,” Woolf said. “With the complexities that COVID-19 brought to all of them, students that need to work, need to work. That doesn’t allow them to take as many courses as in the past.”
The declining trend concerns SOU officials, as it impacts students’ ability to get a diploma as quickly as they can.
“We certainly work with students to try to make their continuation here successful,” Woolf said.
At RCC, the number of full-time students rose from 888 last fall to 931.
Weber, who took the helm of RCC July 1, attributed the increase, in part, to a focus on early registration, with numerous open house events.
“What that allowed for was for our students to be more prepared — get financial aid and textbooks taken care of,” Weber said. “But it also allowed our deans and department chairs to respond to demand.”
One of those demands was students wanting to take classes in person as opposed to online. From this fall over last, registration for online-only classes dropped from 56% to 44%, according to Weber. With early registration, instructors added more in-person class sections this fall. Community education and adult basic skills are popular courses.
Overall, the HECC’s fall 2022 enrollment data showed full-time equivalency rose at two universities and fell at five, whereas it rose or was stable at 11 community colleges and fell at six.
As for headcount, enrollment stabilized or increased at 10 community colleges and declined at seven, whereas it rose at three universities, fell at three, and was stable at one.
One key takeaway from HECC’S data dump is enrollment has stabilized, but has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
At RCC, Weber felt it was “probably an overly ambitious goal” to get enrollment back to what it was before 2020.
“But I think what we will see over the next couple of years, our goal is to continue to increase enrollment based on different strategies we’re going to deploy,” he said.
Those strategies include improving course competition rates and increase term-to-term retention.
“Those will be numbers we won’t be able to look at until the end of fall term and the beginning of winter term,” Weber said. “If we’re yielding the results we hope for, we will continue to see increases. We hope to keep the momentum going for future years.”
For SOU’s sake, Woolf was optimistic enrollment would return to pre-pandemic figures.
“It will take a few years for us to dig out of a hole that the pandemic created,” he said.
Speaking more to overall enrollment trends and less to institutional ones, Amy Cox, director of HECC’s research and data office, noted how the picture for Oregon’s colleges, universities and community colleges resembles the national trend.
“Enrollment (in Oregon) declined about 1% — that is very similar to the national trend,” Cox said. “I think it’s mirroring what we’re seeing as continuing re-opening and development getting out of the pandemic.”
Since 2021, there’s been some stabilization in college enrollment, she noted. But the pandemic and economic fallout from it is still unfolding.
“We’re still definitely also seeing the enrollment picture at the colleges and universities unfolding,” Cox said. “As individuals and families assess, certainly, their own risk but also what the economy is doing.”
The economic conditions might have an influence on individual or families’ assessment of what kind of jobs they need and whether they can afford to go back to school.
“All of these things are linked to the last few years,” Cox said. “As that picture continues to unfold … families are also looking at college enrollment unfolding at the same time.”
Reach reporter Kevin Opsahl at 541-776-4476 or kopsahl@rosebudmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KevJourno.
