WNC sees 17% student enrollment increase

In fall 2023, Western Nevada College has exceeded its enrollment goal by 17% for the institution and achieved the highest among Nevada System of Higher Education schools, President Kyle Dalpe told the Nevada Appeal.

“We didn’t expect to be up this fast,” he said. “Our strategy for the fall was 3,850 students. We’re currently at 4,377 students. That represents over 650 new students, which for us is very significant.”

WNC’s growth is due to a new enrollment management system developed within the past two years. The system now efficiently controls the flow of students from the time they first sign up for classes to when they exit as graduates.

While Dalpe said the community college has not intentionally been looking to grow at a rapid rate because it would mean managing that influx of students, the strategy has been effective in targeting its major student populations and providing its services toward those groups.

WNC’s dual enrollment program targeting high school students, one key demographic adding to the recent boost, has been a major draw for classes in the past couple of years. While the college’s teaching faculty focuses on the dedicated full-time student registered for multiple classes to the part-time workers in need of flexible scheduling options, Dalpe said WNC has scaled up its programs specifically for high school students wanting to get an early start on their college credits.

“Those are students that are actually easier for us to manage, but they have wraparound services from the high school counselors, so the high school teachers, they’re in that K-12 ecosystem,” Dalpe said. “They’re really doing all their work here, which means those people help get them into their next classes here.”

WNC’s main campus in Carson City and its additional campuses and facilities work with seven school districts and four charter schools, and every high school instructor is linked to a college instructor, known as the instructor of record to coordinate classes for students.

“We also put our own faculty in the high schools but we have a limited number of faculty and we don’t have the ability to just add a full-time faculty member easily,” Dalpe said. “We can contract and use the high school instructors and they teach their high school curriculum side by side with the college curriculum for the outcomes to be same and they leverage that up.”

WNC administrators also continue looking at their persistence rate from fall to fall each year for full-time students who remain enrolled. The college is 10% higher than the national average in retaining a full-time population but it lags in keeping part-time students who are more “stop and go” as they drop classes to pick up extra shifts at work, for example.

“We’re trying to put more support around all students, but we’re really focusing on our part-time students,” Dalpe said.

While he’s excited to see the boom, it will become important to see a leveling off in the near future. It will help ensure no one on staff gets overwhelmed and there’s no strain on the college’s system providing services to new or current students, nor a strain on staff.

“There’s an economy of scale for us,” he said. “Our goal for fall 2025 — not 2024, but 2025 — was 4,000,” he said. “We’re already ahead of our goal. Everybody’s already asking me now, ‘What are we going to do?’”

The administration looks ahead to the K-12 system’s predictions and expectations for growth in the future to manage its own. Carson City School District, for example, this past spring, announced a demographic decline in its local enrollment numbers with consultant Davis Demographics and expected to drop from 7,034 to 6,019 in the next five years. Dalpe, who said he kept his own estimates conservative, referred to Superintendent Andrew Feuling’s presentation providing the school district’s outlook in May. Feuling’s district forecast showed a downward trend as live births and student yield numbers in neighboring states such as California, Texas and Arizona were expected to decrease, having a longterm impact on higher education trends.

“The numbers in K-12 are down … but more than that, in 2026, we’re going to see a decline nationally, and in Nevada’s high school students, and it’ll slow down that pipeline of dual enrollment,” Dalpe said. “We might get more students who take it, increasing our saturation, but we also want to look at our other markets, and that’s what we’re doing now.”

WNC also looks ahead to the spring semester, he said, with nearly 4,400 students potentially ready to enroll for classes either traditionally, online, by video or as walk-ins.

“We have almost 650 more students than last time, so that does put a strain on our system, so we want to be sure we’re ready to go,” he said. “We’ve got a class schedule that’s good to go and we can roll into classes for the spring.”

While some might have been reaching for that 5,000-student population mark, which would have placed WNC at approximately half the size of Truckee Meadows Community College, Dalpe said it also comes with managing resources, technology, operations and its workforce, all of which comes with added expenses. Dalpe said WNC won’t receive its state appropriation until the 2025 legislative session.

Dalpe said keeping a steady, persistent growth will allow WNC to grow naturally since with more students, more activities come.

“We get more registration fees, but that goes back into our operations right away,” he said.

Dalpe, who is responsible for submitting his own goals for strategic planning purposes annually and has experience with enrollment management throughout the years, said he never would have predicted being ahead of the technology during the pandemic would have helped to prepare the campus in time for the growth now.

“We want to attract new students, we want to keep the pipeline going, we want to be able to serve the population that’s been going to school,” Dalpe said. “We also want to want to maintain our current population. They’re already committed. They want to finish. We want them to finish. And from a business standpoint, it’s more cost effective and more practical to our ‘Access’ and ‘Success’ mission to make sure that cohort makes it through and bring in new students but maybe not as many.”