'We'll take anybody'

Apr. 17—OTTUMWA — 'The reckoning is here.'

If it is, Indian Hills Community College president Matt Thompson isn't seeing it.

The aforementioned headline kicked off a collaborative story of the impending problems community colleges face with declining enrollment. It's not that IHCC is foreign to that — it's not. It does, however, open up new opportunities for the college to serve its students.

"You know, I think the pandemic taught us a lot as far as enrollment trends," said Thompson, sitting in his office in an otherwise dark and empty administration building on the Ottumwa campus. "It was like, 'What if students don't come back?'

"But what we found is that we actually had a bump in enrollment in the year post-COVID," he said. "I think students want to be on a college campus, especially the traditional-age population, those who are taking college classes post-high school."

What the numbers say

In a report by the Associated Press and others, community college enrollment nationwide has fallen off 37% since 2010, or about 2.6 million students. Iowa, however, may be an outlier; according to Iowa Department of Education statistics, the state saw its first uptick in overall enrollment this year in a dozen years.

Also:

— IHCC's total enrollment has declined 39% since 2010, which is similar to the national average, from over 5,500 students to just over 3,300 at the start of the fall 2022 term.

— For the second time since 2010, part-time students outpaced full-timers at the college, but IHCC has seen a net-positive gain of 2.5% in total enrollment since the numbers plummeted during covid in 2020.

— Concurrent enrollment has gradually trended upward; at IHCC, it went up 26% between 2015 and 2016; at the start of this school year 1,949 high school students were taking college courses.

— IHCC currently has the third-lowest tuition of Iowa's 15 community colleges ($195 per credit hour), trailing only Des Moines Area Community College and Eastern Iowa Community College.

"We've seen the trends that are reflective of what's happening across the country. Sometimes in the Midwest, things happen a little bit later than they do maybe on the coasts," said Thompson, a product of a community college as a student before finishing his degree at Iowa State. "But there are fewer students who graduate high school and go on to post-secondary education. That's down 13% in the last 10 years, like 63% nationally."

Which way do the economic winds blow?

Since 2010, three years before Thompson arrived on campus, IHCC's enrollment peaks and valleys can be attributed to what's happening with the economy, but more specifically, the unemployment rate. And there are valid reasons for that.

For example, when IHCC had an enrollment of 5,520 in 2010, the country's unemployment rate was 9.6 percent on the heels of the Great Recession two years earlier. That meant the average age of IHCC enrollees increased, with more non-traditional and middle-aged students either looking to try their hand at a different career path, or pursuing skills they would need later on.

However, the current job market in Iowa is tight, with under 3% unemployment, essentially full employment. The key, Thompson said, is to keep luring people despite a strong job market. It's more of a what-can-we-do-for-you strategy.

"What we have to do is we have to go to the businesses and industries and figure out ways to do training while they're employed, customized training with employees," he said. "We have established partnerships, but it doesn't show up in the credit enrollment numbers that are reported, because these are mostly non-credit, non-academic programs."

One of the examples of that is IHCC's partnership with Clow Valve in Oskaloosa. The company has employees that work at least 20 hours a week, then go to IHCC for its industrial maintenance technology program.

"They're going through the program on more of a non-credit basis to get the skills that need to be in the profession there," Thompson said. "We do a lot of work with JBS on the non-credit side for English and adult-based learning. We have agreements with businesses across the region and have a job-training plan with them.

"When you have an absence of the adult population at the community college, these are the ways we're remaining healthy as an institution," he said. "We're getting paid differently than we would have if a student was here in a credit-bearing class. We charge businesses for training, and we've established those programs. It's been kind of a shift, where you go to the employees to do the training."

The economy can also play a negative role as well. There is such as a thing as too much enrollment, but Thompson believed the school could handle a total enrollment of 4,000 before any changes would have to be made.

However, the college was solidly over 4,000 just prior to his arrival, and it created major headaches financially for the college. He mentioned the default rate of 29.7%, meaning students weren't paying their bills. A default rate of 30% would have excluded the college from offering student financial aid.

"If we had a recession and 8% unemployment, I believe our enrollment would be over 4,000 and maybe approaching 5,000 students, and that now becomes a major issue," he said. "We had one year to fix our default rate, and that's a major issue that gets you shut down. We're now at 3%, maybe the lowest default rate we've ever had.

"So there's both good and bad with very high enrollment."

Starting them young, and keeping them on the path

Perhaps the real game-changer for Indian Hills' enrollment is concurrent learning — or joint enrollment — where high school students work toward a various level of degree by taking college courses while in high school.

It's also been a winner across the state, as concurrent enrollment increased 6% in the 2021-22 academic year. More than 50,000 students participate in concurrent enrollment, and high school students accounted for almost 43% of total community college enrollment. The college contracts with school districts and charges them 90% tuition, so the money doesn't fall on the backs of the students.

And, with the new Centerville Academic Building coming online for the fall of 2024, and the continued development of the virtual classrooms that started this year in area high schools, Thompson figures this will continue to trend upward.

"It's the greatest deal in education for a high school student to take college-level classes while they're in high school. It's the greatest deal for the family," he said. "I routinely will hear students say, 'I saved a full year of tuition at a university because of Indian Hills. I had one year of education done before I walked in the door.' It's a huge savings, and we feel really good about being able to provide that opportunity."

Also, IHCC piloted a program in the Ottumwa Community School District for career counselors, and increased its usual 13% enrollment of OHS graduates to 30%. Thompson said one of the reasons for the counselors is to have someone onsite to work with juniors and seniors on their career goals.

"They go in and meet with juniors and seniors and follow them into their first year as a freshman at Indian Hills. They talk to them about what they want to do," Thompson said. "It's just a really casual conversation about interests and what we could plug them into.

"What we've found is school counselors in area high schools are so busy dealing with the stresses of mental health, registration, etcetera, and they have less time to spend talking to students about where they want to go to college, what they want to do for a career. This is a service to those schools."

The college is currently hiring for those counselors at various school districts.

'We're nimble'

With the costs of education at Indian Hills low, but exploding at most four-year colleges, Thompson sees a path for community colleges. Like everything else, they are at the mercy of the economy, but not everything is out of their hands. There will be years here the college's enrollment dips 8 or 9 percent, then rebounds by 5 or 6 percent the next year.

It's all cyclical.

"I think we as community colleges are positioned to weather enrollment increases and decreases because we're nimble," Thompson said. "We look at ways we can diversify what we do from an education standpoint. There's no other sector of higher education that operates like a community college. You see something change and you change with it.

"You know why Harvard has like a 99% graduation rate? Because they probably accept only 1% of the students that apply," he said. "We take anybody that rolls out of bed, the day classes start. We accept 100% of anybody that applies. That's just who we are, and that's what makes us special."

— Chad Drury can be reached at cdrury@ottumwacourier.com, and on Twitter @ChadDrury