Facing enrollment drops and new law, New Hampshire colleges rush to team up

The University System of New Hampshire's colleges include the University of New Hampshire (pictured), Plymouth State University, and Keene State College. (Dennis Tangney Jr. | Getty Images)

Even after the exams and papers are done, students at New Hampshire’s community colleges have sometimes faced another headache: credit transfers.

Across the state’s public higher education systems, not all completed courses at a community college are helpful for a given degree at a public four-year college or university. A student pursuing an engineering degree, for instance, might learn too late that the algebra-based physics course they took in community college is less useful toward their four-year degree than a calculus-based course.

It can be a vexing problem, requiring a student to pay for credits they didn’t think they needed.

“The large private online college in Manchester will take everything,” said Stephen Appleby, director of educator support and higher education at the New Hampshire Department of Education, referring to Southern New Hampshire University. “So how do our public colleges compete when they’re turning away credits and one of their competitors is accepting every credit?”

College administrators have been working in recent years to strengthen those course pathways and eliminate confusion. But it’s one of several processes state officials say need to be improved to take on a growing problem for state-run colleges: Costs are too high and not enough students are attending.

New Hampshire colleges continue to face major demographic challenges . High school graduating classes continue to shrink on average. And annual enrollment across New Hampshire state-run colleges and universities has fallen from 31,307 students in 2019 to 27,056 in 2023.

This year, public colleges and universities are being pressed into action. Gov. Chris Sununu signed a law July 12, House Bill 1450 , requiring the University System of New Hampshire and the Community College System of New Hampshire to follow a series of recommendations from a task force convened by the governor last year.

The main objective: increasing consolidation.

The task force had 90 days to try to increase enrollment and decrease costs, and it came away with a clear conclusion. New Hampshire’s public colleges and universities and its community colleges will need to combine resources and scale back in the coming years.

The school systems are not merging – lawmakers abandoned that idea , proposed by Sununu in 2021, after pushback from faculty of the community college system who feared layoffs. But they are coordinating, officials say.

A push toward alignment

Enrollment challenges are not unique to the Granite State. Nationwide, colleges are closing at a rate of one per week, according to Appleby. “We think that’s going to continue to accelerate the next few years,” he said.

But while areas of the country such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona are growing, enrollment problems are particularly acute in the Northeast and Midwest. “We’re not high-growth areas of the country, and our populations are aging,” Appleby said.

Some states are already choosing to consolidate. Alaska, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Vermont are among the states that have tried a similar approach with their state-run community colleges and higher education institutions.

Those states “have gone down this road of saying, ‘Okay, we can’t sustain cost and enrollments,’” Appleby said.

Now it’s New Hampshire’s turn, Appleby and others say. Working with a Boulder, Colorado-based organization known as the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the New Hampshire task force came up with a number of recommendations to carry out the idea – some that would require funding and legislative approval and others that could be done more quickly.

In the short-term category, the committee recommended that the two systems align their credits so community college students can transfer more of their coursework into the four-year colleges and universities. They suggested a fast-tracked admissions process where community college students with a certain GPA could automatically enroll in a USNH college. They also proposed a similar process where a high school student with a certain GPA could easily enter a community college.

Other ideas included recruiting employers who agree to help graduates with loan repayments if they are hired, and consolidating the entire community college system into one entity with one accreditation.

Among the longer-term ideas: further merging the community college and public higher education system under one chancellor and one governing board; eliminating duplicate courses between the two systems to reduce competition; and expanding online instruction.

Different challenges, advantages

Though aligned on the goal of boosting enrollment, the problems for the university system and community college system are different.

For the University System of New Hampshire, whose colleges include the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth State University, and Keene State College, the problem is existential: Fewer students are going to high school in New Hampshire, and fewer high school graduates are going into college.

Beyond the basic demographic challenges accompanying more than 20 years of dropping K-12 enrollment, young adults are concerned about cost and debt, and are gravitating toward online options or alternative career paths, noted Catherine Provencher, chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire, in an interview.

The result is that colleges – both public and private – are not only competing against each other for students but also attempting to sell students on the concept of college itself. Provencher said USNH is largely working to stabilize its student population now, about 50 percent of whom are from out of state.

“Increasing enrollment in this environment? That might not be realistic,” she said.

In contrast, the community college system may be better poised to adapt to toughening economic conditions, noted Mark Rubinstein, the chancellor of the CCSNH and a member of the task force, in an interview.

Community colleges are less dependent on high school graduates and cater more to working adults, who may be more likely to seek higher education training during downturns. And community colleges, which are less residential-based, can meet students’ needs geographically, allowing them to maintain families and jobs outside of classes.

“Part of the way that we’re envisioning the future is that with technology changing, with industries changing, with the circumstances in individual people’s lives causing them to want to alter directions, we anticipate that although the number of 18-year-olds can only grow as fast as as the number of newborns arise, that the number of adults who will need education and will want to pursue new pathways is likely to grow significantly,” Rubinstein said.

Many of the consolidation moves are centered around defensive actions to stop state-run colleges and universities from losing more money, Appleby says. While the University System of New Hampshire has frozen tuition for in-state students for the past six years, administrative costs have continued to climb. Finding savings will allow USNH to hold off on future tuition hikes and maintain financial aid options even as expenses grow.

‘Clear pathways’

Administrators aren’t just trying to stanch the financial bleeding. They’re also trying to build enthusiasm.

One approach is by increasing industry involvement with the colleges. “If I’m a high schooler, a young adult, and I know that if I go through this program at Manchester Community College or at Keene State (College) and then on the other end is a job waiting for me it makes it a lot more likely I’m going to go through the program,” said Appleby.

Clear roadmaps for community college students thinking about four-year college could help too, officials say. Following a law passed in 2022, USNH and CCSNH have coordinated to develop 50 different ”transfer pathways” for community college students, according to a report to lawmakers this month.

Those pathways delineate exactly which community college courses they should sign up for in order to have the smoothest transition to their intended bachelor’s degree if they choose to transfer to a four-year college. A student interested in working in the biotechnology industry, for instance, could follow one of the pathways to enroll in the exact community college chemistry, microbiology, and physics courses they need to finish the degree seamlessly at the University of New Hampshire.

Another tactic is to streamline the college-going experience for students – even before they reach adulthood. That’s where the “Early College At Your High School” program comes in. Previously known as “Running Start,” the program allows high school students to take college courses in high school, allowing them to obtain credits and cut down on costs later on. For students, two courses are free; subsequent courses are $150 each.

“There may be a whole cohort of students in high school right now that haven’t thought about going to college,” said Provencher. “But if we can have clear pathways for students and joint communication … there are opportunities for those students to get some credits in high school, maybe get a lot of credits in high school, go on to the community college system, and then go on to the university system.”

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