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Jessica Howard noticed something different on Chemeketa Community College’s campus this fall.
Parking lots were full.
The college’s president, who took the job in the summer of 2019, said there’s “an incredible physical buzz on campus” for the first time she can recall. More students are sitting in common areas.
After years of declining enrollment, including a sharp drop during the Covid pandemic, Chemeketa is adding students back.
The college this fall counted 9,916 students, 2,507 of them full-time, according to data from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
That’s up about 800 students from last fall.
“It’s been quite the journey, but it’s great to see,” Howard said.
Chemeketa’s growth mirrors a trend around Oregon, where community colleges as a whole saw enrollment grow about 4% compared to the fall of 2023. This fall, 94,898 students were enrolled in the state’s 17 community colleges.
Chemeketa’s enrollment remains about 16% below the fall of 2019, and has been declining steadily since a peak of over 60,000 students at the start of the Great Recession.
State funding for community colleges is based on full-time enrollment, but Chief Financial Officer Aaron Hunter said the recent increase is too small to make a substantial difference in Chemeketa’s budget.
“It’s certainly helping to stabilize where we’re at,” he said.
College leaders are still likely to pursue a tuition increase in 2025 to keep up with rising costs, he said.
Career technical education programs are contributing to the growth.
New programs in diesel technology and a bachelor’s degree in leadership development have added students in recent years.
Other career programs, including welding, automotive technology and health information management, had more students enrolled this fall than pre-pandemic, according to data compiled by Colton Christian, Chemeketa’s dean of academic and organizational effectiveness.
General education, by far the college’s largest program, added about 110 students this fall. That includes students completing associate’s degrees to transfer to four-year universities.
This fall, 1,291 full-time Chemeketa students were enrolled in general education. That’s still 188 fewer than in 2019.
Howard said she’s hopeful enrollment will continue to grow.
“It doesn’t seem reactive, it seems indicative of a broader trend,” she said.
The college is continuing to monitor workforce needs and trends to decide which programs to add, Howard said. Health care, technology and construction are growth areas, she said, and the college has discussed expansions like a surgery tech program.
Chemeketa will begin offering a bachelor’s of science degree in nursing in the fall of 2026 as part of a five-college consortium.
Chemeketa once offered a more robust set of community education classes, non-credit courses that anyone could sign up for to learn things like sewing or a new language.
Those offerings have declined over the years, contributing to an enrollment decrease. Today, they include just a handful of courses focused on wine, agriculture and a few other topics, as well as driver’s education.
“We’d love to make our community ed offerings more like a department’s offerings, the way they used to be,” Howard said.
She said it’s something college leaders have discussed and will likely begin to plan seriously in the next few years. One challenge is that the region the college serves, which includes Marion, Polk, most of Yamhill and part of Linn counties, is largely rural, which makes in-person courses challenging.
“We’re not in a hurry to overbuild, we want to be able to commit to long-term growth in anything we begin,” she said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
