Enrollment Spikes At Community Colleges Across Maryland

In bad economies, it’s cost-conscious undergrads and workers who are flooding Maryland's community colleges for the "distinct value" of an associate's degree, the institutions' leaders say.

 “Some of that is attributable to students coming back for training and programs that would enable them to fight the job market with a little more ammunition,” said Robert Lynch, director of institutional research at Montgomery College, which has a campus in Germantown.

Certainly, it’s no secret that tuition is cheaper at community colleges and that students can wind up cutting costs by transferring community college credits. In fact, the "general studies transfer" degree was Montgomery College’s most popular, according to MHEC data, awarded to 7,669 students for the 2010-11 school year, the data show.

 County residents enrolled at Montgomery College paid $136 per credit hour in 2010. While for four-year schools, the average in-state tuition rate per credit cost $7,260, according to data from the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

But money is only part of the story — kind of.

Enrollment jumps can be linked to bad economies, said Jim Ball, vice president of academic and student affairs at Carroll Community College, where the fastest growing student group is among Thirty-somethings.

“Anecdotally many students are coming back who are changing careers or who were laid off and are looking to re-tool,” Ball explained. “We are continuing to see that trend — although students are taking fewer credit hours overall — that also might be a function of the economy.”

At Howard Community College, the median age of enrollment is 22, according to spokeswoman Nancy Gainer.

“This is the first fall term in the college’s history that HCC has surpassed enrolling over 10,000 credit students,” Gainer said.

That said, enrollment growth at Montgomery College was slight this semester, according to MHEC data, which projected a 1.7 percent enrollment bump to 26,457 students, compared with the 26,015 actual enrollment for fall 2010.

The biggest spike in enrollment at Montgomery College occurred between 2008-09, with fall 2009 credit-program enrollment 7 percent higher than 2008 — 26,147 students compared with 24,452, according to Lynch.

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Germantown Patch Editor Tiffany Arnold contributed to this story.