Countywide : College Enrollment Figures to Stay Same

Enrollment at Orange County’s community colleges this spring is expected to remain virtually unchanged from last spring when enrollment dipped to a five-year low, school officials said Tuesday.

Officials at the county’s four community college districts, which include eight schools, say last spring’s enrollment decline numbers, as much as 6% at some colleges, will remain the same.

The drop in enrollment coincides with a statewide tuition hike for students who already have a bachelor’s degree. Those students, usually people who are retraining for a new job or are taking college courses to upgrade their skills, were hit with a $40 increase in per-unit tuition last spring.

“We’ve lost about half of those students with degrees,” said district spokeswoman Ann Garten.

At Coast Community College District’s three schools, spring, 1992, enrollment rose higher than the previous three years, but last spring, those figures dropped to the lowest in half a decade to 56,465.

Garten said that Coastline, Golden West and Orange Coast colleges together will lose approximately half of the 6,000 students whose tuition went from $10 to $50 in the spring of 1993.

For students without a degree, tuition went from $6 per credit hour, with a $60 ceiling or maximum cost, in 1991, to $13 per credit hour with no cap on total costs last year.

“The major concern for a lot of our students is figuring out a way to pay for the increases in tuition,” Garten said. “Many are simply dropping out of school and getting a job to save money to pay for college.”

Rodney Allison, a 20-year-old student at Orange Coast College, said he took the fall semester off in order to make money to pay for the increase in tuition.

“These increases really put a strain on a student’s budget,” he said.

When 2,000 students registered in the first two days of spring registration Jan. 3 and 4 at Orange Coast College, officials predicted that enrollment would match or exceed 25,000, the highest in five years. But the rush of students quickly dropped off and now enrollment is expected to be one percentage point below last year’s 22,855.

“It’s the strangest registration we’ve had,” said Sue Brown, administrative dean at Orange Coast College. “Usually after winter break very few students show up, but this time there were huge crowds. At first, we thought it meant enrollment would be up again, but it seems that students were just coming in early.”

Before the hike, all three colleges enjoyed a steady increase in enrollment and even had to keep waiting lists for many classes. Officials had been hoping that tuition hikes at four-year institutions in the county would translate into increased enrollment at community colleges, where tuition would appear to be an overwhelming bargain compared to thousand-dollar fees at schools such as UC Irvine.

Other community colleges such as Cypress, Rancho Santiago, Fullerton and Saddleback will not have estimates on enrollment until late January.