By Terrence Leas, president Riverland Community College

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System released 30-day fall semester enrollment numbers for the 32 state universities and community and technical colleges serving the higher education needs of Minnesota.

A first glance at the Riverland statistics may cause some alarm since the System reports a 6.8 percent decrease in headcount (individuals) and a 6.8 percent decrease in full-year equivalent (full-year equivalent is the number of credits sold divided by 30 to produce a full-time student equivalency).

However, to accurately evaluate Riverland’s enrollment statistics, we should compare apples to apples.

Last year’s fall 2003 enrollment numbers included students we were serving in various state

prison programs. This year, Riverland is no longer serving this population. If we compare last year’s fall enrollment at this time compared to this year’s fall enrollment, less the prison students, Riverland’s headcount, as of Oct. 20, is up four percent.

What happened to the prison students? The College had been providing educational programming to inmates in three Minnesota prisons.

At Moose Lake Prison, we offered printing production, computer technology and information processing programming, painting and decorating in Rush City, and a cabling technology program in Lino Lakes.

Due to state budget reductions, the Minnesota Department of Corrections proposed a different financial arrangement to share the expenses of the program. This new arrangement would not have been cost effective for the college.

The potential loss forced Riverland to make a tough decision.

Philosophically, we support adult education within the prison system, but we had to make a tough business decision regarding the cost effectiveness of continuing to provide this service.

We opted to discontinue our prison program and reallocate these resources to other areas of our growing college.

We are using the money preserved by discontinuing the prison program in a variety of ways. We added more sections of liberal arts classes, expanded offerings at the Owatonna College and University Center, and supported new programs that began this year, including the massage

therapist program and the network security associate of applied science degree program.

Our enrollment numbers will not be finalized until the semester is over.

We are still anticipating registrations from our farm business management and customized training programs.

Until we receive these registrations, our enrollment is a moving target.

However, recent enrollment trends reflect an increase. Since the 2000-2001 academic year, Riverland’s enrollment has consistently increased each year.

In light of these increases, one of our main goals is to continue to provide quality educational opportunities and services in the face of this significant enrollment growth while dealing with decreased funding.

So when you see the state’s figures, please do not become alarmed.

Much of the decrease is due to the missing prison enrollments; the rest is enrollments that we have not processed as of the date of the report.

(Dr. Terrence (Terry) Leas is the president at Riverland Community College.)