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PHCC enrollment jumps nearly 10%By RYAN DAVIS
© St. Petersburg Times, Pasco-Hernando Community College's student body continues to grow. School officials announced Wednesday, the first day of fall semester classes, that enrollment had jumped nearly 10 percent from the last fall semester, based on figures from the night before classes started. "It's back on the upswing," spokeswoman Lynn Rothman said. The college's highest enrollment was in 1992-93 and until last year had not experienced any semester enrollment increases since 1994. "I think people are too busy to be too excited," Rothman said. "People haven't had a chance to catch their breath yet." She attributed the increase to the continuing mix of a soft economy, growing Pasco and Hernando county populations and additional course offerings. Slow economies typically inflate enrollments at community colleges as people retrain themselves for other jobs. The 9.9 percent increase is based on full-time equivalency enrollment, which the state uses to determine funding. This formula measures the number of full-time students and adds part-time students based on the number of classes they take. This year marks the second consecutive fall semester with a gain of about 10 percent over the year before. The total number of full- and part-time students jumped to 5,278, a 12.7 percent increase over last fall. PHCC hired a Tampa consulting firm to study its enrollment trends last fall. The firm, Enrollment Management Center, urged school officials to give their school a more emotional pitch to potential students. Sell PHCC as a place where students would get a unique experience, consultants said. They also urged the school to implement an enrollment management plan, which it has begun to do. "We haven't really implemented a whole lot of it yet," Rothman said.
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From today's Hernando Times |
