Atlantic Cape Community College signed a partnership with Stockton University, Aug. 8, for a 3+1 academic program that leads to a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies. It is an encouraging step. We favor any effort by Atlantic Cape to increase its relationships with four-year institutions in order to provide students with seamless transitions to four-year degrees.
In another sense, this announcement is more business as usual in an area where business is not strong.
We, in Cape May County, live in what the American Council on Education defines as a post-secondary educational desert. The county depends solely on one community college for higher education opportunities. Even then, the community college is a branch campus of a larger community college that has its main focus in its home county.
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A bachelor’s degree in liberal studies might have some value for
a few students in Cape May County. For Atlantic Cape, however, to reverse its
ongoing decline, it must focus on offerings that dovetail with the county’s needs.
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Enrollments of Cape May County students at Atlantic Cape have been in decline for years. The pandemic hurt, certainly, but the decline had begun long before the virus arrived. The prediction by those who study community colleges is that the problem will get worse as fewer students crowd the ranks of high school graduates.
Yet many community colleges, Atlantic Cape among them, have maintained a heavy focus on being the less expensive route for those seeking the four-year degree. It keeps the focus on the traditional age student where the demographics of the potential student body is shrinking. The most recent Atlantic Cape Institutional Profile shows that 75% of college’s declining enrollment remains students under 21 years of age.
In 2016, then-President Peter Mora had a five-part plan for reviving the college’s flagging enrollments. That plan included encouraging the enrollment of nontraditional age students. The “fly in the ointment” was the lack of change in the college’s recruitment efforts. As the Herald reported even then, the focus remained traditional age students coming out of high school.
If one is serious about the nontraditional age student, the adult seeking a leg up in career and employment options, the focus needs to move to occupation-related programming relevant to career opportunities in our county with its peculiarly tourism dominated economy.
Sure, Atlantic Cape has tried to operate in this environment, but the enrollment numbers tell a different tale. We are not just talking about being available to create training programs for a company willing to pay for them. We are talking about a coordinated effort with employers, county officials involved in economic development, and chambers of commerce to focus attention on the workforce needs in the county and to a targeted approach to those needs.
That targeted approach would need to focus on all the challenges faced by the nontraditional student – the need for special advising, flexibility to help balance jobs and family, credit for life experience, and financial assistance, to name a few.
Yes, it would involve money and risk. But there are sources for money if the plan is good enough; what risk is worse than the slow death by ever declining enrollments?
It is time to make the community colleges more than just a less expensive way to start on a four-year degree. That slant on the market is not going to cut it in an era of skepticism about degree value, a visible crisis related to student loans, and a documented decline in traditional age demographics.
Community colleges have the flexibility to be whatever they need to be to support the community they serve. Of course, taking a route that shifts focus to workforce needs, occupational opportunities for adult students, and forging links to vocational programs means altering the self-focus that community colleges have to see themselves as junior members of the greater higher education academic world.
This is not a problem unique to Atlantic Cape. The National Student Clearing House reports that community colleges have lost 37% of their enrollments since 2010. In Atlantic Cape’s case, that percentage is even higher.
Community colleges definitely have a role to play in helping students who seek to eventually gain a four-year degree, but reality is that the success rate is very low and has not changed a great deal over the years. We have the statistics and this is no secret.
The answer is an all-out effort to find ways to intimately link community colleges to community needs. A recent survey at the Harvard Business School said that employers are unimpressed with the preparedness of those community college graduates who do manage to graduate because they find the majority not ready for work.
There is nothing wrong with the new Stockton program. We applaud it. But it has very limited application to the post-secondary issues in our community.
It is time to focus on greater relevance to community needs. Don’t take our word for it. Just look at the enrollments. They cannot any longer be explained away by the pandemic or by shrinking numbers of high school graduates. Relevance is the real issue.
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From the Bible: God said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 1:28
