Moreover, community college
officials have said that more than half of those who have earned workforce creden- tials through the FastForward program have returned to college for additional training, raising the potential that they could become full-time students. This year’s General Assembly
appropriated an additional $4 million for the grants supporting the FastForward program, raising the biennial total from $9.5 million to $13.5 million. Kraus says a major effort in its six-
year strategic plan, Complete 2021, is “to triple the number of credentials we put into the economy.”
Free tuition? Some community colleges are
turning to philanthropic sources to add students to their rolls. An example is Patrick Henry Com-
munity College near Martinsville. The college’s full-time equivalent enrollment (FTE), those students taking at least 15 credit hours, jumped 8.1 percent this year to 1,669 after seven years of declin- ing enrollment.
The enrollment surge at Patrick
Henry was fueled by a free community college education program (called SEED) for local residents. SEED is funded by a three-year, $3.1 million grant from the Harvest Foundation, a nonprofit organi- zation whose mission is to build economic prosperity in the community. “Our SEED funding with Harvest
requires students to take a minimum of 15 credits per semester” in order to take advantage of the program, says Greg Hodges, Patrick Henry’s vice president for academic and student success. “So, Harvest’s SEED program has
allowed PHCC to stop the enrollment decline [a 40 percent loss in seven years], and more students are now taking more credits. Our local data shows that our growth is tied directly to SEED.” Kraus says other community colleges
have similar programs. For example, Virginia Western Com-
munity College in Roanoke has a public- private partnership called the Community College Access Program (CCAP). The program covers tuition for three years at Virginia Western for current-year high
school students who do not have sufficient financial aid to pay the full costs. CCAP supports as many qualified students as possible, based on student need and funds available for each locality. “CCAP has been instrumental
in helping Virginia Western keep its enrollment among recent high school graduates steady,” says Josh Meyer, the college’s director of marketing and strate- gic communications. ”Over the past five years, CCAP has enrolled 42 percent of our recent high school graduates starting at the college each fall.” Last year the Virginia Western
Educational Foundation, which oversees the CCAP program, launched the CCAP2 campaign — its second fund- raising campaign to benefit CCAP. The campaign’s goal is to raise $6.5 million by 2021, Meyer says. “Colleges are becoming increasingly
dependent on philanthropic organiza- tions, whether they are investing money for textbooks or supplies, uniforms or fees, or, in the case of the Harvest Foun- dation, tuition,” says Hodges of Patrick Henry.
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