Students run through the leaves on a sidewalk near the Walton Science Building in October 2015 at Centralia College.
After experiencing a decrease in enrollment, officials at Centralia College reported numbers are rising for the spring and fall semesters.
Robert Cox, vice president of Student Services, told the college’s board of trustees that the recruitment and marketing campaign for new students is producing positive results.
“It’s been very doom and gloom it seems like since I started here in terms of enrollment,” he said. “It’s been dropping fast and we’ve been doing so much to try to turn that around and we continue to do a lot.”
Spring and fall application trackers show the numbers of future students is increasing.
For the spring term, the college has more applications than it did this time last year, but Cox said the real indicator is the fall application tracker.
Compared to two years ago, the college has 110 more people, and is up 21 people from last year.
“Not only are we getting more applicants, we are also working those lists like we haven’t before,” he said. “We have the ambassadors that are calling those people so we are trying to not only get more applicants, we’re trying to increase our percentage of yield which is going to have a compounding effect on the enrollment.”
Cox said he is “cautiously optimistic” about the encouraging numbers of enrollment for the fall term.
In November of last year, college officials said if enrollment did not increase, it would impact the budget for the 2017-18 school year.
Based on the number of students attending Centralia College at that time, the school’s budget was up $90,000 for 2016-17 for a total of $12.2 million, but if enrollment did not increase, officials said it would drop $475,000 down to $11.7 million for the 2017-18 year.
