Queens College has responded to enrollment declines by focusing on transfer enrollment through strengthening its partnership with neighboring CUNY community colleges.
Since the Fall 2020 semester, QC has experienced a 19% decline in total student enrollment. The new initiative aims to increase the enrollment of transfer students to QC by making the transition from LaGuardia Community College and Queensborough Community College to QC as seamless as possible.
The two primary sources of QC’s enrollment numbers come from incoming high school graduates and transfer students from nearby CUNY community colleges.
In a statement given to The Knight News by QC Provost Patricia Price on March 28th, she states: “The proportion of transfer students has declined from 62% of our total headcount in 2015 to 40% today. We’re targeting our efforts this year to increase that proportion to at least match our 2015 numbers.”
In 2023, QC announced the Better Neighbors Initiative to strengthen its relationship with Queensborough Community College and LaGuardia Community College. Both institutions have historically provided QC with a significant number of transfer students. The Heckscher Foundation has given a grant of $150,000, which is being split between both QC and Queensborough Community College. The advisory firm Ithaka S+R, which also received $20,000 in funding from the project, has partnered with the initiative to create course equivalencies for credits that are being transferred among these institutions.
“From these funds, we are providing ‘Dine-Design-Align’ grants to our faculty to support meetings with community college counterparts to share a meal and strengthen collaboration at the program level while ensuring that our advising staff has a regular presence on the community college campuses,” Price said.
In addition to these efforts, Price has spoken about approaching working students who want to attend QC by making more night classes and Friday classes available. In a sit-down with The Knight News and administration on March 3rd, Provost Price expanded upon the college’s enrollment struggles and discussed the possibility of expanding course scheduling.
“[We are] taking a very detailed look and informed look at our schedule, and we now have a published schedule for review and cancelation of little enrollment sections, and we’ve done that for about the past year and a half, and I think that’s really effective, and it’s sort of become part of our culture here.
“The chairs know and the faculty know that if we are three weeks out from the start of a semester and a class has not met a threshold enrollment, it’s going to probably be canceled, and the effort of the faculty is going to be reallocated to areas in the curriculum that need more sections open, particularly these gateway sections and popular majors that we just can’t get enough sections running of. So being more intentional with our scheduling is something that we’ve started on,” Price said.
While QC offers night classes Monday through Thursday, plans to expand courses that could be held during weekends are still in development, and current options for working full-time students are still limited.
“We need to go further in that effort, we need to look at providing classes on Fridays and evenings and on weekends. We used to, I understand, have a really robust program for weekend course offerings here, which allowed a lot of working students to complete their degree while they still worked full time. And we need to do more of that, and so we’re going to continue looking at our scheduling,” Price said at the March 3rd sit-down with The Knight News.
However, there are also many in-person services that are closed during weekends, such as the QC Hub, Financial Aid office and the Office of the Registrar.
The QC Hub is only open Monday through Thursday between 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., and the Financial Aid office is open Monday through Thursday between 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., but holds limited office hours on Fridays between 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. The Office of the Registrar, which relies on a ticketing system rather than a direct email address, only holds office hours Monday through Thursday between 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Given the limited schedules of these services, the transfer process can be disrupted if these services aren’t readily available at all times.
With the nature of how transferring between schools is always case-by-case and can be overwhelming and stressful for incoming students, it’s critical that QC provides on-site support and counseling to optimize for the best possible experience of a transfer student.
Even though QC has fostered a positive relationship with other CUNY community colleges, it remains to be seen whether or not enrollment will grow from these efforts or if enrollment will remain stagnant.
