As enrollment rates continue to shrink for most Mississippi community colleges, enrollment is up at Meridian Community College.
“We feel really good about our fall enrollment. We worked very hard to try to recruit as many students as we could,” said MCC President Dr. Scott Elliott.
According to the Associated Press, fall enrollment has risen slightly for Mississippi’s eight public universities, but has fallen for the sixth year in a row for the state’s 15 community colleges.
Elliott explained that enrollment is heavily impacted by the economy.
“There’s an inverse relationship between the economy and community college enrollments. Community college enrollments in Mississippi peaked in 2010 when the economy was really in the tank because people were coming back to school and looking for new job skills. Ever since then, as our economy has improved, quite frankly less people have enrolled in community colleges.”
But despite this, Elliott explained how MCC was able to increase its enrollment rate by 6.4 percent.
“I think we tried more aggressively to tell our story to the community. We probably did more advertising than we had before and had a lot of press releases. But mostly it’s just a matter of one-on-one contact. Going out to our area schools and talking to students out there, and also going out into the community. We go to churches, we go to things like the Meridian Housing Authority, and just any where we can think of.”
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