MANATEE — President Barack Obama wants to invest some $12 billion in community colleges with the aim of seeing an additional 5 million students graduate by 2020.
This goal comes while many schools are already bursting at the seams with droves of displaced workers hit by the recession and competing with traditional students seeking an education bargain.
It is a familiar scenario for Manatee’s local community college and other local schools facing a tidal wave of new students.
State College of Florida celebrated record growth this fall, reaching a new high in enrollment with 12,000 students.
President Lars A. Hafner has said the community college is the second fastest-growing among 28 in the state.
SCF is employing a variety of strategies to handle the crowd, said Jessica Klipa, a spokeswoman for the college.
For example, it has been able to accommodate new students, while maintaining classroom size caps, by hiring 14 full-time faculty members for the fall term, she said.
The college also has asked faculty members to teach extra classes and also employs adjunct professors, she added.
In order to lessen pressure on the campuses, SCF has beefed up its online e-Campus offerings, Klipa said. The associate in arts degree is now available online and more students are signing up, she said.
The school, with campuses in Bradenton, Lakewood Ranch and Venice, also is focused on improving its efficiency and productivity, she added.
“With all that said, we are operating extremely efficiently because we’ve had a lot of practice doing more with less,” said Klipa. “Obviously, more resources are needed in order for the quality for which SCF is known to be maintained for future generations.”
Manatee Technical Institute enrolled 4,048 students during the 2008-09 year, a 24 percent increase over the year before, said Maura Howl, a spokeswoman for the technical center.
“We’re trying to accommodate as many people as we can,” she said.
The technical institute is hiring new instructors this year at both its Bradenton and Lakewood Ranch campuses, she said.
Its adult education classes are jammed with students, too.
“In addition to our job preparation classes, we also have our adult ed classes for people to learn English and get their GEDs (high school equivalency),” she said.
“We are getting lots of people, but with no funding to hire any more instructors, we’ve got 50-55 people in a class. And because they want and need it, they’re staying in the program.”
Sara Kennedy, Herald reporter, can be reached at (941) 745-7031.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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