WILLMAR — Ridgewater College President Craig Johnson was featured in the Fall 2020 issue of Enterprise Minnesota magazine .
Johnson was part of a four-person panel of technical college administrators discussing enrollment trends, shrinking budgets and COVID-19 on campus.
The article provides a look at how college administrators across the state are managing trends in technical education.
The colleges represented were Ridgewater College in Willmar, South Central College in Mankato, Alexandria Technical & Community College in Alexandria, and Lake Superior College in Duluth.
Questions ranged from enrollment status in the age of COVID-19, specific program impacts from enrollment trends, the role technology plays in technical education and the state’s looming budget deficit.
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“One of the most frustrating things here at Ridgewater was that we had experienced a decline in enrollment from 2011-2019. We had lost about 30% of our students during that time period. That’s a huge blow. But this past year, we had turned that around and we had about a 2% growth, and then COVID hit,” Johnson said in the article.
“And so what’s really sad to see is that pre-COVID, the morale boost, people feeling good about the reorganization we had done, and the redesign of our recruiting and retention efforts, was having a positive impact. And now with COVID, we’ve bounced back and forth in our comparison date to date, this year to last year. We bounce back and forth between being up 5% and down 5%.”
Ridgewater College is a public community college with campuses in Willmar and Hutchinson. It is part of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.
