Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2004 | 9:03 a.m.
Two years ago officials at Nevada State College at Henderson were struggling to recruit enough students to keep the state from shutting the college down.
Now college officials say they are struggling to accommodate a surge in enrollment that has brought them nearly 300 more full-time students than the state budgeted for them this fall.
It's a struggle Interim President Patricia Miltenberger said she's glad to have, but a struggle nonetheless.
Preliminary enrollment numbers for the fall semester, which started Monday, estimate 822 full-time students and a total head count of 1,185. At the same time last year the college had 349 full-time students and a head count of 531. The college gets funding for 500.
"We suspect it (the enrollment) will go down, but that's still a 100 percent change from fall 2003 to this year," college spokesman Spencer Stewart said.
Final enrollment numbers for this fall will not be available until mid-October, Stewart said, as students are still enrolling in classes this week and then can drop courses over the next couple of weeks.
As the enrollment has soared, other areas of the college have had to grow as well, Stewart and Miltenberger said. The college has added 10 full-time professors, including three full-time education professors and five full-time nursing professors.
The increase in nursing faculty is partially in conjunction with a $500,000 federal grant that allowed the college to offer an accelerated nursing degree, Miltenberger said.
The college is also offering 50 new class sections this semester for a total of 200.
But all of that growth has strained classroom space at Nevada State College's Dawson building, a renovated vitamin factory, Miltenberger said, forcing college officials to do some "creative scheduling."
"We're definitely crunched for space, there is no doubt about that," Miltenberger said.
The college is currently offering classes from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on most weekdays, holding classes on Saturdays and polling students to see if they would consider taking classes on Sundays, Miltenberger said. They are also developing more online courses and considering more hybrids -- classes that meet in person from time to time on weekends but also do course work online.
Professors are also teaching more students in each section -- 25 to 30 students each instead of the 16 to 17 they had in a class last year, Miltenberger said. The increased class sizes save space and money.
In addition, the college has set up two portable buildings to accommodate the extra students and is asking the state to allow it to set up two more to help meet the increased enrollment expected in the spring, Miltenberger said. The portables that opened this fall house a new nursing skills laboratory, student meeting space and offices for all of the nursing faculty, freeing up room in the school's single main building for all of the other new faculty.
The college already has an agreement with the Community College of Southern Nevada to use open space in its facilities and is looking at leasing more space until the college's liberal arts building is finished, Miltenberger said.
That building is at least two years off, Miltenberger said, and that's only if she and other officials in the state's higher education system can convince Nevada's lawmakers to cough up the extra $9 million the college needs for construction.
Founding President Richard Moore, now an economics professor at the college, had told state lawmakers in 2001 that he could raise $10 million privately to match the state's $13 million allocation. The college's foundation has only raised $1 million.
CCSN and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas have similar growth concerns as student enrollment is predicted to grow by at least 5 percent each year. Tentative enrollment numbers for CCSN predict about 887 more full-time students than last year and 1,774 more students overall, bringing the total head count to 37,245. UNLV did not have any fall enrollment figures available Monday.
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