No end in sight for declining enrollment at Santa Rosa Junior College

Santa Rosa Junior College, a century-old institution with Ivy League-style brick buildings and stately oak trees on its Mendocino Avenue campus, is about to reopen a popular theater transformed by a $32 million renovation and break ground on a $78 million science and technology classroom building.

The school that has served 1.7 million students since opening in 1918 in a Santa Rosa High School basement still has millions of dollars remaining in voter- approved bond funds to continue developing what President Frank Chong calls “the campus for the next generation.”

But a cloud created by declining enrollment - down 20 percent since 2011 - shrouds the venerable college, prompting cuts in faculty and curriculum that make it harder for students to get the classes they need and boosting class sizes beyond recommended levels.

The alarming trend isn’t limited to Santa Rosa Junior College. Declining enrollment pervades the state’s community college system, the largest in nation, and is also affecting the budgets of public primary and secondary schools statewide.

The downturn shows no end in sight, with many factors at SRJC that Chong and others say are beyond their control - the prolonged economic expansion, the county’s shrinking school-age population and sky-high housing costs, exacerbated by the loss of thousands of homes to the 2017 fires.

According to some on campus, the fallout at SRJC - conceived at the end of World War I to give Sonoma County’s farm kids a pathway to UC Berkeley - threatens to undermine it as a launchpad to higher education and quality vocational training.

Recent changes, including cuts to instruction and additions to class size, have “jeopardized our legacy of excellence,” said Sean Martin, a philosophy instructor and president of the All Faculty Association, the union that represents instructors.

Chong, 63, who took the helm of SRJC in 2012, just after the enrollment decline began, says the college remains an exceptional Sonoma County institution, tops among all community colleges in the state for its transfer rate of students into the University of California system. Its recent initiatives include a pioneering commercial hemp cultivation project at its Forestville farm and plans for a cutting-edge regional construction trades center in Petaluma.

“The future of SRJC will be one of quality, not quantity,” he said. “The college will continue to be ‘the go to’ choice for affordable quality education for both transfer and workforce training in the region.”

But the cuts keep coming. This semester, SRJC put on hiatus a flagship program that has trained rangers at city, county and national parks for more than four decades, citing declining enrollment and an anticipated budget crunch.

Chong, along with board members, instructors, boosters and student leaders, says the surging economy is largely to blame, pointing to a similar pattern across the state and nation.

“I don’t pray for a recession, but it’s good for our enterprise, higher education,” he said.

The student decline dates from the wake of the recession. Enrollment in the state’s community college system of 115 schools peaked in 2008 at 2.7 million; by 2012, it had sunk 2.1 million, a 22 percent drop. It held steady at around 2.1 million through 2018, but enrollment at SRJC continued to fall, fueled almost entirely by the loss of part-time students.

Chong, a former Obama administration appointee who has worked 28 years in higher education, was matter of fact about what he sees as the root cause of the trend.

“When the economy goes north our enrollment goes south,” said Chong, the fifth SRJC president - and first nonwhite top boss in the college’s history.

Lekkyes Dakwakas, SRJC student body president, echoed Chong’s assessment: When good-paying jobs are readily available, prospective students opt for a paycheck rather than lectures, labs and homework, he said.

“The better the economy is doing, the fewer students we have in school,” he said.

By sheer headcount, part-time students dropped from a peak of 32,115 in 2008 to 18,389 this year, according to SRJC records. The count of full-time students, by comparison, has held fairly steady, slipping by just 186 students over the same period, to 4,266 students this year.

Overall enrollment, which blends full-time and part-time students, dropped from 21,316 in 2011 to 17,033 students this year, the lowest level in at least two decades.

Slash in budget and classes

The plunging student population has exacerbated an ongoing budget crisis that dealt Chong two years ago with the most acute crisis of his tenure. It came amid a plan by his administration to slash half of all summer classes in 2018 to close part of a $6.5 million budget deficit.

The move, announced just days before summer registration, spawned virulent outcry among faculty and students. Days later, the Academic Senate passed a vote of no confidence in Chong but stopped short of calling for his resignation.

Chong rescinded the plan and apologized repeatedly for not consulting faculty or student representatives beforehand.

“I didn’t just screw up a little,” he said in an interview at the time. “I screwed up royally.”

But he also cautioned that SRJC could not continue to offer all the education programs it maintained when enrollment was more robust. Under his leadership, the college has continued to reduce class offerings and downsize its academic workforce in a bid to align expenses with revenue, including funds tied to enrollment.

The college is offering 5,756 classes this year, down 35 percent, from the schedule of 8,814 classes offered during the recession in 2008 and 5 percent less than last year.

The faculty, measured by full-time equivalent instructors, numbers 1,090 this year, down about 350, or 24 percent, from 2008.

The cuts have eliminated some courses, reduced the frequency that others are offered and generally increased class size, said Martin, the union leader. The union advocates shifting staff cuts to other areas, including management, he said, calling the administration “still pretty top-heavy.”

“Faculty always have taken the immediate hit from lower enrollment,” said Martin, noting that layoffs hit part-time instructors hardest.

The current budget of $180.7 million is actually higher than in previous years, including during the 2018 crisis, when it was $161 million. That discrepancy is partly the result of a $7.2 million boost in fire relief funding that campus officials say is meant to freeze the budget at pre-fire levels.

“That gives us some breathing room, or else we’d be operating at a deficit,” Chong said. The relief funding expires in 2022.