Hard times are filling community colleges

At Wake Technical Community College this week, long lines of people, many freshly unemployed, snaked out the admissions office door. Classrooms were flooded with so many new students that senior administrators filled in as instructors.

Even as public community colleges are dealing with budget cuts, business is booming.

At Wake Tech, enrollment this spring is 14 percent higher than last spring. That amounts to 1,700 more students -- not counting those taking distance courses or enrolling in eight-week abbreviated courses later this semester.

Ray Pleasant, of Apex, was a mechanical designer for Caterpillar until Nov. 10, when he lost his job abruptly. No two weeks' notice, no severance. So at 46, he signed up for two Wake Tech classes.

Books and tuition cost about $500, money he doesn't really have because he's living on unemployment, which pays about 60 percent of his former salary.

"I'm basically just putting it on credit," he said.

Desiree Brint, also of Apex, is back in school, too. Brint worked as a contract technical writer until she took the summer off to spend with her daughter. When she was ready to go back to work in September, she says, everything had changed.

"I used to go from one contract to the next," she said. "Now I can't find anything. So I'm changing careers."

The 52-year-old was in line at the campus bookstore Friday afternoon with 20-year-olds, waiting to pay for a book on medical terminology. She hopes to learn enough through the class to be begin doing medical writing, medical transcription, or at least to be able to speak the language in an interview.

She had considered getting the training to do medical writing anyway, but the job market gave her the prompt she needed.

"Not making any money is a great source of motivation," she said.

Community colleges routinely find themselves in a Catch 22 in economic downturns; their budgets shrink as demand for their services spike.

"When unemployment goes up, our enrollment goes up," said Wake Tech President Stephen Scott. "Some, to find a job, period. Some to find a better job. We're adding seats, we're looking at the fire capacity of our classrooms, and we're adding the maximum seats we can."

A statewide problem

Scott is trying to figure out how to handle the new students while trimming his budget by $2.3 million. To meet the demand, he said two vice presidents are teaching classes and he plans to teach education classes in student leadership later this spring.

Across the state, community colleges have similar stories.

Last fall, enrollment rose at 49 of the state's 58 community colleges, said Peggy Beach, a spokeswoman for the state's community college system. One rule of thumb: for every percent increase in unemployment in North Carolina, community college enrollment jumps 2 to 3 percent, Beach said.

In Wilmington, Cape Fear Community College expects record enrollment this spring. In Charlotte, Central Piedmont Community College enrollment may rise as much as 16 percent, and locally, Durham Tech expects growth in the five to seven percent range, officials report.

"It isn't primarily rural and it isn't primarily urban," Beach said. "It's statewide."

Many new community college students are shifting to industries viewed as recession-proof, like health care and information technology, officials say. At Wake Tech, courses in the basic sciences -- biology, anatomy and physiology -- are popular now because they lay the foundation for any number of health-related careers.

And Wake Tech's video gaming and simulation courses -- in which students learn to create the next Super Mario Brothers -- is a burgeoning local industry, said Scott, the Wake Tech president. Triangle companies employ about 1,200 people in that field, he said.

"They hire our graduates," he said. "In fact, they hire some before they graduate."