Cerritos College has gone through some major changes the last few years, from a new president to new buildings and even a change in enrollment.

On Oct. 5, at the board of trustees meeting, Dr. Fierro gave a presentation about where the college was in terms of enrollment.

Fierro explained that enrollment has been declining in the last year and hasn’t improved.

“Our enrollment started to decline at the end of the fall semester and became more noticeable in the spring semester,” he said.

During the presentation he went on to explain some of the factors that may have an effect on students signing up.

The biggest one is the unemployment rate. The current unemployment rate is 5.3 percent in LA county, which is the lowest in the last seven years.

Fierro went on to say, “Historically, when the economy improves, enrollment goes down.”

Due to the fact that the economy is stronger, more jobs are provided, and thus students are choosing to go straight to work rather than go to school.

In addition to that, another external factor in lower enrollment is that full-time students are reverting to a part-time schedule in order to get a job or deal with family circumstances.

For Fierro and the school, the goal is to increase full-time equivalencies to meet the base the state had set.

“The current projections is

to generate $17,250 full time

equivalent students

but we want to increase that and we are working to increase that to $17,619 to be able to meet the base that was assigned by the state,” he said.

Student trustee Karen Patron gave a positive reaction regarding the low enrollment situation.

“Dr. Fierro is finding ways to increase our FTES by offering more courses, which will not only benefit new students, but students currently enrolled,” she said.

Offering more courses is the main strategy to increase FTES, but there are several in the works.

Some of the ways stated are:

Increase the number of sections offered for Fridays and weekends

Increase the number of hybrid courses with block schedules

Increase the number of online courses

Dual/Concurrent Enrollment programs at local high schools

Finish the development of full online programs

Maximizing summer schedules

A number of nine-week courses have been added and numbers have been steadily increasing according to Fierro.

The goal for the spring semester is to increase the number of sections per course and have a robust set of courses during the summer to make sure the school hits its mark.