Rising Student Enrollment, But Cutting Budgets?

By: Ryan Dettmann

Though most four-year colleges like private colleges and community colleges have seen an increase in enrollment with the recent hard times. But few have considered the troubling factors with the recent increase enrollment with community colleges and the continuing cutting of education spending for community colleges. This not only bad because it cuts the staff but also affects the education the students are receiving from the community college.

With the cuts on education not only makes the college cut faculty, but also puts a bigger strain on the faculty left at the institution to teach growing classes and a bigger amount of work to grade and plan for. This will constrain the colleges ability to accommodate the increasing class of students making classes more crammed for space and decreasing the possibility of getting the usually small personal community college experience. Additionally, this in a combination with the cutting of the staff can have a more increasing affect on how many students can accomplish getting a diploma. In previous blogs it was mentioned how with the increasing population going to community colleges was troubling because a noticeably smaller percentage of the school population gets and college diploma and graduates. So with the cuts in budget it hurts the school’s ability to acquire not only new teachers but also keep and hire better ones to reverse and better community college’s ability to graduate their students.

The cutting in funds towards community colleges is a startling thing that will hurt them, their students, and the workforce coming out of the colleges. Government officials and the general population should be informed about this growing issue that is occurring in higher education today.