COLUMBUS, Ind. — IUPUC and Ivy Tech Community College – Columbus, have seen a slight fall enrollment drop.
Ivy Tech said it has a 12.8% drop in its enrollment headcount from 2019. IUPUC has seen a 9.3% drop (counting both undergraduate and graduate students).
Randy Proffitt, Ivy Tech Columbus vice chancellor for enrollment services, included comparisons to about 20 other Ivy Tech campuses with his report to the Ivy Tech board. Campuses around the state are down anywhere from about 4% to 19% in enrollment numbers.
The Kokomo and Muncie campuses, which are similar to Columbus in terms of 2019 enrollment numbers, are down 11.1% and 12.3%, respectively, Proffitt said.
Scott McIntyre, IUPUC’s new director of enrollment management, said that the largest drop in enrollment, both for the Columbus campus and the larger university system, was in new “beginner” students. The undergraduate beginning class for 2019 was 286; this year, it was 210.
Many students told school officials they were going to take a gap year or were “reassessing their college plans,” McIntyre said.
“The continuing students, what we’ve found statewide for all IU campuses, it was less than 1 percent off of the year before,” he said.
When it comes to dual credit — high school students taking classes for both high school and college credit — IUPUC usually sees about 20 to 22. This year, the campus has only seven. He said this was likely due to high schools going virtual.
While fall enrollment is down, McIntyre expects that students who delayed starting college in the fall of 2020 will look to start in spring or fall of 2021. He said that IUPUC is already seeing more applications from both transfers and first-year students for the spring semester.
For more on this story, see Tuesday’s Republic.
