Crush of Students a No-Show at S.D. Community Colleges

To the befuddlement of many administrators, the crush of students expected at San Diego community colleges this year failed to materialize. In fact, enrollment dropped slightly.

“We really are pretty surprised,” said Barry Garron, a spokesman for the San Diego Community College District, whose classes began Tuesday.

The district had said earlier in the year that it expected to turn away as many as 4,000 students, but opening-day enrollment at its three campuses was instead 39,976--more than 1,000 students shy of last year’s figure, the district said.

The community colleges had also expected an influx of students frustrated in their efforts to get classes at neighboring San Diego State University, where 662 course sections have been cut because of budget constraints and thousands of students have tried to crash courses they were denied.

Garron attributed the enrollment decline to the slicing of 170 course sections and publicity surrounding budget and class cuts at the three community colleges: City, Mesa and Miramar.

“We will eventually have the same enrollment as we did last year as students add and drop classes,” he said.

“SDSU students are trying to crash their classes, but more of them will come over after they have not gotten their classes there,” Garron said.

However, other school officials disagree on the impact SDSU students will have on enrollment at the community colleges.

“I think that we’ll get some more students this week, but I don’t expect that we’ll see the big rush of SDSU students that was expected,” said Jeanne Atherton, president of San Diego City College.

Atherton said she thinks that “some students were frightened off by all of the dire warnings that they wouldn’t be able to get their classes.”

Even if the lower enrollment figures persist, the colleges will not lose state funding, which is based primarily on enrollment, since they are already operating above the enrollment caps allocated by the state, said Atherton, whose campus has more than 15,000 students.

“We don’t really know if we have fewer students taking more units or not, and that is something that we have to take a close look at in the next couple of weeks,” she said.

Other community colleges in the county experienced modest enrollment increases as expected.

“We’re running about what we expected,” said David Feldman, vice chancellor of development and community relations in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca College District, where enrollment increased about 5% despite a cut of 115 course sections this fall.

Enrollment at Palomar College in San Marcos also rose an expected 5%, to 23,642, but classes could not be added to accommodate the increase, said Herman Lee, director of admissions and records.

“We weren’t able to offer any more sections than last year, so the only choice we had was to try to fit people in existing sections and expand class size,” he said.

“We have noticed that students are taking more classes this year than in previous years . . . and it could be that students that would have been full-time at the state universities may be coming over here to be full-time students,” Lee said.

Enrollment at MiraCosta College has also “steadily gone up, as expected,” rising 4% this fall to 9,247, said Lynn Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Oceanside college.