By Jamil Oakford/editor-in-chief

Spring semester enrollment dropped by at least 5 percent on most TCC campuses, according to college figures. 

Each campus saw a drop in enrollment this spring with the exception of newly accredited virtual campus TCC Connect.

For TCC Connect president Carlos Morales, the enrollment of 14,000 students was exciting news.

“This affirms our commitment to offer quality, nontraditional learning opportunities while providing flexibility, which accommodates the busy lives of our ever-changing student body,” he said.

Morales also realizes that growth offers challenges, too.

“As we grow, our campus will need to continue to evaluate how we do things to be more responsive to the needs of our constituents,” he said.

Numbers for each campus are what TCC calls a duplicated head count, according to research analyst Patrick Ramirez.

“With a duplicated head count, we’re basically looking at classes,” he said.

The Office of Institutional Intelligence and Research looks at the courses a student takes on which campuses.

“If a student is taking one online class, two courses on NE and a class on South, they’ll get tallied for each campus,” Ramirez said.

Students are counted as TCC Connect students if they take any online courses, which could help explain TCC Connect’s growth.

“Now if you tried to add up each campus’ enrollment numbers and compare them to the district head count, they wouldn’t add up,” Ramirez said. “And that’s because the district tallies up each individual that’s enrolled.”

TCC Connect’s numbers used to be lumped in with TR’s enrollment. But now that TCC Connect has been accredited as a separate campus, the enrollment drop on TR is reflective of that.

TR dropped from well over 20,000 students in spring 2015 to just over 7,000 this spring. NW saw a 6 percent drop, South dropped 5.8 percent and NE, 5.7 percent. SE saw the lowest drop at 2 percent.