By Priscilla Mensah
CUNY-wide enrollment has been at an all-time low since the start of the pandemic, and Brooklyn College has not been spared. Perhaps if Brooklyn College, and CUNY officials in general, devote more time to matching students with jobs or provide more scholarship and grant opportunities, we may see an increase in student enrollment. I’m sure the solution may be more complex than that, but at least it is a starting point.
An example of how Brooklyn College has not been spared in this declining enrollment trend can be seen in the college’s low enrollment-based class cancellations. Although some have viewed the CUNY-wide problem of low-class enrollment as primarily affecting community colleges, class cancellations at Brooklyn College effectively show that BC has not fallen behind.
In some real-life instances, professors have canceled classes because of low enrollment numbers. This, in turn, has left students with the inconvenient task of rescheduling, often with little time to thoroughly research a class as they had done previously. How do I know this? Because I was that student. One of my classes was recently canceled due to low CUNY enrollment in general and low-class enrollment specifically.
I had prided myself in enrolling in all my classes at Brooklyn College and sorting out my schedule as early as possible. I didn’t procrastinate and did everything right to ensure that I would have an interesting and engaging spring semester. So, imagine my surprise when weeks after enrolling in classes, one of my prospective professors told me that the class they were slotted to teach would be canceled if more students did not enroll.
This professor even went as far as to ask us to spread the word about the class to other students in hopes of boosting enrollment; the latter of which I did out of my excitement to take the class. Ultimately, the class was canceled since the requisite number of student enrollment needed was unattainable. Just a few days before the start of class, I had to choose a class that would not conflict with my schedule, which was no easy task. Also, because I was crunched for time, the class that I ended up choosing was not one that I was very much interested in taking, per se.
This is just one example of how students at Brooklyn College have also been impacted by the CUNY-wide trend that has seen student enrollment plunge to shockingly low numbers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several theories could explain – and in fact, have been posited by experts in the field to do just that – the decreasing rates of enrollment seen throughout the CUNY educational system since the pandemic’s start.
As late as February of this year, there have been reports about the plunging rates of enrollment across CUNY. As explained by experts on the subject, this plunge has been facilitated largely by the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected working-class jobs, many of which CUNY students were employed in prior to the pandemic.
The pandemic directly, and in some cases indirectly, caused unemployment rates to skyrocket, especially in jobs that pay on the lower end of the pay scale spectrum. The problem with this is, as I mentioned previously, many CUNY students, Brooklyn College students included, were employed in these sectors. Thus, due to no fault of their own, these same CUNY students were left unemployed and no longer able to fulfill the tuition demands that come with obtaining a college degree.
CUNY higher education officials need to be fully aware and sensitive to the idea that many CUNY students have lower-paying jobs. In turn, these officials should formulate their administrative plans to consider this fact.