Central Arizona College’s outreach team, from left:
Hazel Rossi Assistant Director of Recruitment
Travares Peterson Director of Student Engagement
& Activities
Sandra Lascher Director, Strategic Enrollment
Management & Outreach
In Front: Veronika Mosley Program Specialist Outreach
by Blake Herzog
Many community colleges have seen their enrollment drop significantly since the pandemic, but Central Arizona College’s soared 39% for 2021-22 while it offered tuition-free classes to all students.
It’s poised to grow even more this fall as most pay a discounted rate per credit hour.
Vice President of Academic Affairs Mary Kay Gilliland says an influx of pandemic-related federal funding last summer allowed the college to waive tuition for all Pinal County residents, building on its Pinal Promise initiative that provides free admission to graduating high school seniors in Pinal County. Non-Pinal residents qualified for up to six free credit hours per semester.
The decision was announced in July 2021, and word spread like wildfire.
“I think we were surprised at how successful it was; it was almost an immediate response and we were scrambling to fill those extra courses in time,” she says.
Gilliland says she was especially impressed by the number of returning students circling back to complete a degree or program they had started years before: “It’s very easy to say, ‘OK, I’ll get back to that eventually.’ But then suddenly you hear about free tuition and think, ‘Wow, that’s an opportunity’.”
Gilliland says demand was especially strong for health care classes and such skilled trades as welding, both of which have requirements for in-person learning that had to be managed last fall while some pandemic restrictions were in effect.
Otherwise, it was the online sections that filled up first while some face-to-face ones lagged, a reversal from previous years. Gilliland says the trend is now shifting in the other direction: “I think our campuses will be a little fuller this fall,” with the San Tan Campus growing the fastest.
CAC couldn’t continue free tuition this academic year, she says, but rolled the cost per credit hour back to a “bare-bones” rate of $50, down from $86 in 2020-21.
Rather than pushing registrations down as some people had feared, enrollment continues to edge upward to 4,000 students.
“What we like to think optimistically is that we have students who began college or came back to continue college and are keen to complete their certificates or degrees and are sticking with us,” she says.
Vice President of Student Services Jenni Cardenas says CAC is providing personalized support, especially important since a majority of students are from low-income families and the first in their family to attend college.
“Even with increased enrollment we’re still able to have small class sizes, we’re still able provide that individualized attention and individualized help for all of our students,” she says. “Those are really positive things that we’ve seen.
“We’re working at focusing on really finding intentional ways to engage, to help students get that sense of belonging and really connect with the college. Students who are connected in some way to the college have a higher chance of graduating and reaching their goals.”
