Enrollment Up at Community Colleges After 5 Years of Decline

Administrators of the Ventura County Community College District credit savvy marketing and a deeper selection of general education classes. Students say that more employers these days are requiring college degrees.

Whatever the reasons, Ventura County’s three community colleges are attracting thousands more students than they were a year ago.

Registration for the fall semester, which begins Monday, is up more than 14% over last year, with the number of students at Moorpark, Ventura and Oxnard colleges again approaching its heyday of the late 1980s.

“The effort of the district was clearly to try and increase enrollment this year,” said Kay Faulconer, the acting vice president of instruction at Oxnard College.

“To do that, each college has made a commitment to increase our offerings in the general ed curriculum,” she said.

The figures represent a dramatic turnaround from each of the last five years. The district’s student population had plummeted every year, dropping from a high of nearly 33,000 students in 1990 to less than 26,000 a year ago.

Enrollment figures are critical to community colleges because state funding levels are determined by the number of students each district teaches.

For Carlos Gamino, a 23-year-old student returning to Ventura College, higher education translates to a better job down the road.

“It’s harder now to get jobs, so education is pretty mandatory,” said the psychology major, who hopes to transfer to UCLA when he finishes his general course work.

“But this year there’s more to offer in the district,” Gamino said. “There’s more options now than there ever have been.”

By Friday, when initial registration periods at each of the three campuses had ended, more than 25,000 people had signed up for fall classes. During the same period a year ago, just 21,932 students were enrolled.

In addition to attracting the most students overall--10,665--Moorpark College had the largest increase in its student population. The hilltop campus boasted an 18.5% rise in enrollment over the 1995 fall semester.

“We’ve tried to add classes to our schedule that are the core, basic general ed courses that most students need to take for prerequisites and to transfer to universities,” Moorpark College President James Walker said.

Walker also credited the district for advertising on cable television, as well as state legislators for keeping community college fees at $13 a unit for the upcoming year.

“This is the first year in a long time that there hasn’t been threats from Sacramento about the possibility of fees increasing,” he said. “Even when people are just talking about increasing fees, it’s discouraging to potential students.”

Oxnard College experienced a 16.3% increase in the number of people taking classes, enrolling more than 5,000 students for the semester.

Faulconer credited much of that boost to the college’s new satellite center in Camarillo, where more than 600 people have signed up for computer, foreign language and other classes.

“It’s always tough to identify a single variable,” she said. “But another factor is that we no longer have the differential fee for college graduates.

“The Camarillo center is attracting a number of people who have degrees and want classes for their personal or professional growth,” Faulconer said. “They may not have enrolled if there was still a differential fee.”

State legislators recently retracted a $50-per-unit fee for community college students who already hold bachelor’s degrees.

Another reason that more students are enrolling at Ventura County’s three community colleges is an overseas marketing campaign.

Since early this year, former Oxnard College President Elise Schneider has been traveling the globe in an attempt to recruit foreign students, who pay much higher tuition than California residents.

Schneider said she has attracted more than 60 students from other countries in the last six months.

“All of the recruits have their eyes set on UCLA,” said Schneider, who plans to return to Asia in October. “So I tell them that we’re the first two years, and the good relationships we have with [four-year] institutions.”

Tanya Paez is among the 3,500 or so new students within the three-campus district. Like hundreds of others, she has no idea what she wants to do for a living, but she wants to graduate from college.

To do that, she said, she must complete her general education requirements at Ventura College and then transfer to a four-year university.

“I got math and psychology OK, but all of the English classes were full,” said Paez, who just graduated from Santa Paula High School. “I’m not worried, though. I’ll find one somewhere.”