By Jamil Oakford/ editor-in-chief

TCC’s physical campuses saw a rise in enrollment this fall while TCC Connect saw a significant drop.

TCC Connect, the college’s accredited virtual campus, includes weekend college, distance learning and, up until this semester, dual credit. In the spring, the campus saw just over 14,000 students enrolled. But this fall, the campus dropped nearly 30 percent, only seeing approximately 10,000 students.

At the same time, physical campuses received a bump in their enrollment numbers. The campuses with the largest boost were NW and SE.

The college’s lead research analyst Holly Stoval attributed the noticeable increases at the physical campuses to a big change at TCC Connect.

“We had another internal restructure,” she said. “Dual credit has returned to the physical campuses, which is why those numbers look so big.”

Dual credit, a program that allows high school students to enroll in college courses to earn both high school and college credit, had been centralized under TCC Connect. But starting this fall, dual credit was returned to physical campuses, and the difference is noticeable.

“In the fall of 2015, there were 6,900 dual credit students enrolled in over 13,000 courses at TCC,” Stoval said.

This also explained why SE’s enrollment numbers rose the highest among the physical campuses.

“SE will pick up a lot because they work closely with Arlington ISD and Mansfield ISD, two of the biggest districts as far as dual credit goes,” she said.

Institutional research analyst Patrick Ramirez said the college still uses duplicate headcounts when tallying the enrollment numbers on individual campuses.

“A student can be enrolled on one or more campus and therefore must be tallied in each individual campus’ headcount,” he said.

This means if a student takes a class on South but also takes a class on TR, they count as one student on each campus.