Enrollment down for spring semester
Dominic DeCono
Lower attendance at MCC might have more of a negative impact to students than people realize.
Historically, MCC has had lower attendance during the spring semester than the fall semester.
Unfortunately, lower attendance also means fewer classes.
Many students this semester found that classes they had signed up for months ahead of time for the spring semester had been canceled because not enough students signed up for them.
According to the Registration department at MCC, more than 50 classes had already been cancelled at both MCC campuses due to low student sign ups.
The same report saw a decrease in student enrollment by over 1,800 students.
Mandy Reynolds, a business student at MCC, said the canceled classes may force her to transfer to another school sooner than she expected.
“I want to knock out all of my business credits here but because so many classes I wanted to take got cancelled this semester, I’ll probably just transfer after this semester,” she said.
Most of the courses that were cancelled were 150 and above level courses affecting almost every department.
Rino Mazzucco, an electronics professor at MCC, said it does have a negative effect on the school during the semester.
“Students drop out from the fall semester or just stop coming all together and it’s a problem I hope the school can look into to see if we can fix it,” he said.
Mazzucco also says because so many classes have been cancelled early in the semester, students need to be aware of all the classes they sign up for and monitor their status until at least the first day of classes.
“Unfortunately this is one of the problems with community colleges, you never know if you’re going to get enough students for each of your sections,” he said.
Henry Winslow, a chemistry major at MCC, said he was dropped from a class four times because they were cancelled.
“The sad thing was at least two of them were 101 level courses. It made the start of this semester sort of frustrating for me,” he said.
Despite the fact that attendance is lower this semester than usually, there is no reason to suspect that attendance will continue going down for the fall semester of 2013.
