Helping a community college plan for the future

Alamance Community College (ACC) is a public community college with campuses in Graham, North Carolina and Burlington, North Carolina.

They asked Carolina Demography to help them understand what they would need to know in order to plan for recruitment, enrollment and future programs over the next decade.

Approach

We worked with ACC to formulate key questions concerning Alamance County’s demographic, workforce, income and education trends, then identified the most useful datasets pulled from a wide variety of public sources. We prepared a databook with projections of demographic and economic trends in Alamance County and created a one-pager with summarized high-level information for ACC to share with college personnel and the wider community. The information included descriptive statistics and projected trends related to demographics, poverty rates, commuting patterns, where ACC graduates go after graduation, projections, and workforce trends.

Impact

ACC is using our forecasting to make decisions about potential capacity and future needs.

We didn’t anticipate how helpful and useful this data would be for immediate enrollment management. It is a very useful document! – Constance Wolfe, Ed.D., Executive Vice President, Alamance Community College

Groups at ACC using this data include the Strategic Planning Committee, the enrollment planning group, and the Board of Trustees. “We have used the data to help guide strategic enrollment decisions (recruiting, onboarding, program development, marketing, etc.) and shape our next strategic enrollment management plan,” says Constance Wolfe, Ed.D., Executive Vice President, Alamance Community College.