TRC summer, fall enrollment on track

Three Rivers College is on track with last year’s enrollment numbers, despite concerns that COVID-19 and financial issues will keep students away.

For the summer semester, which will be online, more than 690 students have registered for nearly 5,000 credit hours. In fall, when the college scheduled in-person classes to resume, more than 1,200 students have registered for more than 14,800 credit hours.

“Not only am I happy about this, I am shocked,” Dr. Wesley Payne, TRC president, said.

The current enrollment for summer is higher than last year. Numbers are a little down for fall, but he expects those will continue to increase, he explained.

Payne said the largest way for the college to enroll students involves going to area high schools and bringing students on campus. Because of restrictions with COVID-19, neither of those happened this year.

As a result, the Student Services Department worked with high schools to send out information to students, as well as making phone calls and sending emails.

On the academic side, Payne said, department chairs focused on the schedule and ensuring students can take the classes they want.

They are using the same process for fall enrollment and “chasing students diligently,” he said.

“It’s been a very slow, methodical, sometimes very frustrating process,” he said.

Payne described one of the common things administrators can see while trying to enroll students.

They receive an application at 8 a.m. and, for example, it’s 9:15 a.m. before it reaches the top of the stack. Somebody calls that student at the provided phone number, and it is disconnected.

“So, what do we do? We try to find them,” he said. “We email them at their email address; we send them letters at the address they had … Nobody has a home phone number anymore.

“There isn’t a phonebook of cellphone numbers. It doesn’t work that way.”

For fall, Payne said, the college will not truly know what enrollment looks like until the first day. However, summer enrollment is encouraging for what fall will look like, officials believe.

“From a fiscal standpoint, this is not a huge impact,” Payne said. “It’s helpful. Summer is by far our smallest enrollment period, but I think what this gives us some hope for is that fall enrollment may not be as bad as we had first feared …

“We still are in dangerous territory, but we’re making up ground, and we’re doing it one student at a time.”