I agree with the thesis, but not the logic. Dr. Rhoads attempts to tie the recent enrollment declines to limited budgets. “Enrollment in community colleges across the country is plateauing and declining,” he argues, “despite rising student demand.” Dr. Rhoads seems insistent on this latter part, but here is where I get lost. Although demand is much higher than 5 years ago, many states have had declining enrollments since two years ago.

Moreover, the sharp decline in enrollment was projected ahead of time based on demand-based factors*. I predicted the sharp decline in Iowa’s community college enrollment because of decrease in demand.* The U.S. Department of Education estimated enrollment would move from a 7% growth between 2008 and 2009 to a 0.8% growth between 2009 and 2010 (turned out to be a 1.7% growth) using a methodology primarily based on demand. Oddly, Dr. Rhoads report also cites a Community College Review article that notes several states expected their enrollments to decline, even in states where he claims students are being turned away because of budget cuts.

The reason for the decline? I think that many students who jumped into community colleges simply graduated, transferred, or entered back into the labor market. Dr. Rhoads, during a bit of a Twitter conversation, noted that the graduation rates have not increased at community colleges, and he’s absolutely right. But the graduation rate formula at community colleges are woefully inadequately, capturing first-time, full-time students. In this instance, it’s more meaningful to look at total number of awards. In Iowa, we saw the largest jump in the number of awards since we started tracking that statistic. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to grab the most recent national statistic.

It is also likely that there was a reduction in student demand as unemployment began to recover. Although the unemployment rate has been slowly declining, there has been a reducing in the number of unemployed individuals. In August 2009 (the fall 2009 semester), there were 14,823,000 unemployed “adults” (16+). At the beginning of the fall 2011 semester, there were 14,008,000 unemployment adults. Currently, as of February 2012 (let’s call that the spring 2012 semester), 13,430,000 unemployed adults.

The Converse

Like I said, I ultimately agree with Dr. Rhoads. The budget cuts, “operating more with less”, has taken a toll, but not in the way he suggests. Instead, I suspect community college enrollment in specific majors/programs was artificially capped during the enrollment surge. Enrollment in community colleges grew 7% in 2009, which was likely caused by the sudden economic deterioration. During this point, we saw colleges struggle to add capacity to technical programs which could not expand fast enough to keep pace. Within Iowa, there were numerous instances of programs with long waiting lists.** At this point, Dr. Rhoads is right; many students were turned away and, likely, those who would benefit the most from college.

Rejoinder

Dr. Rhoads is a respected scholar and the report seemed to catch the attention of other good education researchers. The line of argumentation doesn’t make sense though. Student demand is clearly higher now than 5 years ago, but there is no way enrollments are going to be as high as 2009. Yet, the report compares current enrollment with the enrollment peak as evidence that students are being turned away.  California is a clear case where this is happening, but the evidence isn’t clear in the other states***

These seem like minor quibbles. It would be easy agree to disagree with the logic for an argument I ultimately agree with. But I think it is very important for academia to play a mediating role between government, administrators, and the public. Lawmakers who are bent on reducing public expenditures will claim that higher education is well-funded or even over-funded–even when they are clearly not adequately funded, such as the case now. Higher education administrators will complain they are under-funded or have too many burdens even in periods where funding is adequate and the regulation is meaningful.

And some of it is my past experience. I hated, hated, when an advocacy paper from a think-tank was released that played fast-and-loose. As a result, there was a lot of running around trying to adjust the newly-formed misconceptions. Normally, these reports argued against my belief or policies. In this circumstance, there is a peaceful rejoinder on an unfortunate circumstance–we ultimately agree that students are being turned away, just differ on when it happened. Even when community colleges had rapidly increasing enrollment, the limit on programs seemed to conflict with their open admission policies. Although students were admitted and were suitable for some programs, there was simply no room.

My new publication in November’s IR Applications, which is published by the Association for Institutional Research:

This paper explores the relationship between student major and industry of employment and its application to higher education accountability. Data provided by statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS) have enabled state educational agencies and colleges to follow students into the workforce. While most studies have focused on wage outcomes, this study shows how to use SLDS data to understand the correlation between major and industry. The transition into the workforce is an important outcome since it is an assessment of a college’s ability to develop specific, targeted sectors of the economy. We use SLDS data from Iowa to follow community college alumni from 2002 through 2008.

Find it here.

We’ve tried a few other methods to display this same data at the Iowa Department of Education. Below is a the standard image that shows up in our Tuition and Fees Report and Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges. We use a similar, static plot, with one major difference is we plot on dollar amounts, not percentage.

I’ve previously highlighted a Tufte scatterplot of the same data. Below we use shading to represent the approximate decade of data. The lighest points represent the 1970s, which grows darker until the black points represent the 2000s and the red point is the most recent data:

I like the interactive nature of the Chronicle data, but I don’t like that you cannot see all of the data without having to scroll. I’m not sure why the Chronicle chose to especially highlight Iowa data–it was accompanied by an article about funding in general which talked with a lot of Iowa leaders–but it is always nice to see someone else using our data.

A record total of 106,597 full- and part-time students enrolled in community-college courses this school year, a 4.8 percent increase that marked the 14th consecutive yearly rise in the overall student population.

Tom Schenk Jr., educational program consultant with the state Department of Education, said this year’s jump followed a 14 percent increase last year that was the second-largest rise since the community college system was started in 1965…

Because community college enrollments tend to be cyclical with economic conditions, Schenk said projections call for the number of enrolled students to drop by as much as 9 percent in the next school year.”That’s our best guesstimate,” he said. “Community colleges have been cautious about this huge enrollment increase knowing that this is not something that necessarily is going to be sustainable.”

The projected enrollment for next year stood at 103,290, which would be a 9.3 percent drop from this year’s expected total but a 3.1 percent decline from the actual student count.

I want to clarify, I didn’t say “guesstimate”.

Presented to ALOP 282 at Drake University.

From the upcoming The Annual Condition of Iowa's Community Colleges 2009

The state of Iowa has established three targeted industry clusters: advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and information solutions. How have Iowa’s community colleges been supplying the industry? Above is an ideogram showing the path from program major (left) to targeted cluster (right). Obviously bioscience is being well-stocked, mostly from health science majors. I’m a bit surprised though that information technology majors go on to information solutions at about the same rate as other targeted clusters.

I’ve already previewed a few ideograms which show the transition from college majors to industry of employment. You can find the project page here, a presentation, and the poster.