For giggles, every once in awhile I start looking at institutional enrolment data.  This weekend, I started looking specifically at community colleges.  I noted back here that enrolment in colleges nationally has been pretty flat for the last five years, but that’s a national picture only.  Start drilling down to the level of individual institutions, and things start getting pretty interesting.

For the most part, it’s not hard to find data on individual college enrolments over time, even without paying extortionate fees to Statistics Canada.  The four Atlantic provinces essentially only have one college each so Statscan’s cansim data covers it pretty well (though you need to go to individual annual reports to get anything past 2015-2016).  Colleges Ontario’s Environmental Scan publishes FTE data and a slightly different set of counts is available through the Government of Ontario’s Open Data platform.  We at HESA just did a review of Manitoba Colleges, and put all the recent historic enrolment data in the report, Saskatchewan Polytechnic’s enrolment numbers are all available on its website, while the Government of Alberta and the Government of British Columbia both but consolidated institutional statistics on their websites.  The only real black hole is Quebec, which appears not to publish such data at all.

What I found intriguing about this data was the number of community colleges – mainly quite small ones – that had experienced enrolment drops of ten percent or more, which is usually a sign that an institution may be about to face some significant financial problems.  And it turns out there are quite a lot of these, but not exactly where you’d think.

Let’s start out east.  Holland College dropped 14% between 2011-2012 and 2015-2016 while College of the North Atlantic dropped 13% from 11-12 to 16-17.  New Brunswick also saw a dip in enrolments, but well below the 10% mark.  Nova Scotia’s college enrolments are more or less stable.

Out west, we see stable enrolments pretty much across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, even in smaller regional campuses such as Sask Poly’s Woodland campus and The Pas’ University College of the North.  But move further west, and it’s a different story.  In Alberta, six colleges posted falls of greater than 10% between 2012-13 and 2016-17.  Portage College (-62%), Lakeland College (-51%), and Northern Lakes (-15%), all of which serve relatively remote resource-based northern communities, saw huge hits to their part-time enrolments after the end of the oil boom.  Fort McMurray’s Keyano College saw a 23% drop which was spread more equally across full- and part-time students.  Olds College, located in a town of 10,000 people north of Calgary, saw a 33% drop, again concentrated entirely in part-time students.  And Medicine Hat College, located in a larger, southern urban centre but still largely dependent on the gas industry, saw a drop of 19%, spread over both full- and part-time students.

Next door in British Columbia, no fewer than eight institutions saw double-digit drops in FTE enrolments between 2011-12 and 2016-17.  Five of them were serving relatively small/remote communities – College of the Rockies in Cranbrook (-11%), North Island in Courtenay and thereabouts (-15%),  Northwest College in Terrace (-25%), College of New Caledonia in Prince George (-28%)  and Northern Lights Community College all over hell’s half-acre from Dawson Creek to Fort Nelson (-30%).  But there are some urban colleges facing these kinds of drops too: Victoria’s Camosun College is down 10%, while in Vancouver, Langara (-12%) and Vancouver Community College (-32%–holy moly what is going on?) have seen drops too.  Up north, Arctic College in Nunavut saw its enrolment drop 10% last year (but is even with five years ago), while Aurora College in the NWT saw a drop of nearly 35%.

So what we see here is a mostly consistent pattern.  Where there are demographic shortfalls, we tend to see college enrolments doing badly.  Not everywhere: rural/small town colleges in Manitoba and Saskatchewan seem to be doing all right, for instance.  And it’s not only rural colleges taking a hit.  But Northern BC and Alberta are frankly alarming, as is the Northwest Territories (though that may be a case of weak college management than actual demographic pressures).    And that’s a real problem.  It’s almost impossible to close colleges in remote towns, but per-student costs can only continue to rise.  The need for more creative ideas about how to better solve the problem of college service delivery in rural/remote areas (which I discussed back here) is clearly becoming quite urgent in some parts of the country.

But wait, you say.  Haven’t we forgotten Ontario?  What about rural/remote colleges in Ontario?  Ah. Well now there’s an interesting story.

For the most part, Ontario colleges have not had too bad a time of it.  Even in areas under demographic stress, we aren’t seeing big drops in domestic college enrolment (perhaps because small Ontario colleges, unlike the ones in BC and Alberta, do not have a university transfer focus and hence tend to have an older clientele).   But nevertheless there are a few of those small-town colleges which appear to be trying something quite interesting: namely, making partnership deals with private colleges in big cities in order to access the international student market.

To take a few examples:  Cambrian College in Sudbury saw its international enrolment jump from 693 in 2012-13 to 1,684, nearly entirely through enrolments at Hanson College in Scarborough, York and – amazingly – Vancouver.  St. Clair College in Windsor has added a few hundred international students at Ace Acumen Academy off Don Mills Road.  Canadore College in North Bay has partnered up with the brilliantly-named “Stanford International College” (which seems to mostly offer trade/voc courses) to offer courses at three of its GTA campuses.  I am told there are more of these arrangements, and that when the 2016-17 international numbers are finally released, people are going to go bug-eyed at how many international students are now enrolled in rural colleges at privately-administered GTA campuses (specifically, I’ve heard one northern Ontario college now – on paper at least – has 48% of its student body come from international sources, though you’d never guess it by walking around the main campus).  Though the numbers aren’t public, they were scary enough to push the Government of Ontario into calling a moratorium on such arrangements.

The main takeaway here for researchers is: don’t always focus on the macro-picture.  Sometimes, the micro-level data delivers the really interesting stories.