In every team and department at Northwest Vista College, there are always great stories to tell that show faculty and staff going above and beyond.While it’s hard to capture every story, we hope to periodically share in this space some of the major accomplishments or projects that are taking place. Members of the executive team will write about important topics that they feel NVC employees should be made aware of.
Let us know about the positive things your area is doing to help students or improve processes by contacting myself or NVC Marketing & Strategic Communications.
– Dr. Ric Baser, NVC President
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Dr. Daniel Powell
Vice President for Academic Success
How do you measure successful enrollment? Should it be tied to our budget? Traditionally, the more enrollment we have, the more we are allocated. There is no doubt that we are in challenging budgeting times and there are concerns with the budget when enrollment is down. Budget is not, however, how we should define the success of our mission.
Northwest Vista College’s mission “creates opportunities for success by offering quality academic, technical and life-long learning experiences to its diverse communities in a collaborative, student-centered, data-informed and shared leadership environment.”
I think the key phrase when we relate the mission to how we define successful enrollment is “offering quality academic, technical and life-long learning experiences to its diverse communities.”
NVC should offer programming that meets the needs of our community with a complementary mix of workforce and transfer experiences. Because the Far West Side of San Antonio has grown so quickly, the economy has been transformed and we need to diversify our programs to match economic opportunities for our students in this rapidly changing community. Similarly, our student body is mostly younger, traditional students who transfer to other institutions. But NVC has an opportunity to meet the needs of our older community and diversify its student body to include more non-traditional students. We need to define our successful enrollment based on the market penetration of potential students in our community that would benefit from a credential to increase their socioeconomic mobility.
A recent Hanover Research report analyzing the adult learner population stated that the market of prospective adult learners in San Antonio is nearly 75,000. Data from the American Community Survey (ACS) indicates an estimated 74,885 individuals between ages 19 and 45 whose highest educational attainment level is some high school but no diploma or equivalent credential. Prospective adult learners in this research study have a wide range of jobs, with many in construction and service occupations earning below $30,000 per year. We need to capture more market share of these students with our programs and help give them access to improve the lives of their families. Adult learners would be well suited for our IT programs, Community Health Workers, Water Resource Management, our Nursing cohort, future teachers, transfer core classes, the list is endless. This means we would need to create more flexible schedules that are accessible to this population which may mean more evening classes.
Because we serve one of the fastest growing areas in the country, NVC should be growing in enrollment size and diversifying our student body and programming to meet our diverse community needs.