Unable to halt a huge enrollment slide at home, Pima Community College is reaching across an ocean to solicit students in China.
Efforts to attract foreigners have taken on urgency as the Tucson school tries to cope with the cumulative loss of 5,000 full-time students in the past three years — roughly akin to losing the entire population of one of PCC’s six campuses, recent reports to the school’s Governing Board show.
The college, which is on probation with its U.S. accreditor over mismanagement and lax governance, recently spent about $17,000 to send a four-person delegation to Beijing and parts beyond.
PCC also made a promotional video, subtitled in Chinese, that paints a flattering picture of college operations.
It does not mention the probation sanction or that PCC’s international program has been skeletonized by years of neglect, according to the recent executive reports.
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PCC Chancellor Lee Lambert, who led the China delegation late last month, said foreign outreach needs to start now because the college is facing a critical shortage of American students.
While many U.S. community colleges have had modest declines, PCC’s enrollment has plunged to levels not seen since the turn of the century, audited figures at a recent board meeting showed.
A report from PCC finance boss David Bea said the number of full-time-equivalent students fell from about 23,000 in 2011 to 18,000 in the last school year. The decline shows no signs of leveling off; enrollment for the current fall term is down around 8 percent compared with last fall.
The downturn corresponds with a 2011 decision by PCC’s Governing Board to cancel the school’s long-standing open-door admissions policy. The board later reversed the decision, but the school has yet to recover from the impact of the change.
Lambert said massive spending cuts likely will be needed within a few years unless PCC finds ways to reverse the trend.
“If we don’t start putting measures in place today, we’ll be cutting out big chunks of the college two or three years down the road,” he said in an interview.
The Governing Board has scheduled a special meeting Monday to look at possible ways to reduce costs in future years.
The push to enroll more foreigners — who typically pay much higher tuition — is one of several changes PCC is making in hopes of a finding new sources of income and improving its operations.
Also in the works are upgrades to its limited online offerings. Online education can be a cash cow for colleges, allowing them to enroll many more students at reduced cost compared with classes held on campus.
In the video recently produced for the China trip, Lambert claimed “hundreds” of foreign students flocked to PCC for the last school year.
In fact, there were 135 — down about 80 percent from the 750 or so who attended a decade ago. The program shriveled because PCC’s previous leadership didn’t invest in international education, a recent board report said.
To start fixing that, Lambert plans to add several new six-figure employees to PCC’s payroll by the 2017-18 school year, starting with a new vice president of international programs to be hired later this school year.
Initial student recruiting will focus on East Asia — China, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and South Korea — and on Mexico and Central and South America. In 2016, PCC also will start targeting students in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Lambert hopes to have 1,000 foreign students a year at PCC by the 2017-18 school year. Together they should generate about $5 million in new revenue for the college, staff reports show.
Lambert said he didn’t think it was necessary to disclose PCC’s probationary status during the recent China trip because the college is fully accredited while it is on probation.
Besides adding to PCC’s coffers, having more international students would benefit all students by exposing them to different cultures in an increasingly globalized world, school officials say.
PCC recently received a draft report from its accreditor that indicates whether the school has improved enough to be taken off probation, but Lambert so far has refused to publicly release the report.
The accreditor, the Chicago-based Higher Learning Commission, is expected to decide the college’s fate in February.
