Re-read that last sentence.\u00a0 Our new students in high school programs (dual credit, P-TECHs, Early College High Schools) increased by 14.4% this Fall.\u00a0 By contrast, this Fall there are 7,526 traditional students who are new to ACC, a slight decline over last Fall of -0.8%.\u00a0\u00a0![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/213\/2019\/12\/pay-1036469_640-300x212.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
What about continuing students?\u00a0 We have 4,372 continuing students in high school programs this Fall, an increase of 7.0% over last Fall.\u00a0 We have 25,178 continuing traditional students, a decline of -4.0% over Fall 2018.<\/p>\n
What about Distance Education?\u00a0 We have 12,416 students in Distance Education classes this Fall, an increase of 11.1% over Fall 2018.\u00a0 2,580 are new to ACC, and 9,836 are continuing students.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/213\/2019\/12\/banner-1183443_640-300x90.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
These numbers are not an aberration or an anomaly.\u00a0 They reflect a trend – our student population is changing.\u00a0 As of today (12\/11\/2019), our Spring numbers show an increase of 16.7% in new high school program students, and a decline of 6.0% in new “traditional” students.\u00a0 Our continuing high school program numbers have jumped by 12.9% over Spring 2019, while our continuing traditional student numbers are currently -2.0% below last Spring.\u00a0 Our Distance Education numbers show an overall increase of 7.9% to date over Spring 2019.<\/p>\n
In other words, our Distance Ed students make up approximately 30% of our overall enrollments, and our dual credit students make up slightly more than 20% of our overall enrollments.<\/p>\n
These numbers mean we are serving different students in different settings than we did in 2009.<\/p>\n
Do these numbers mean we should be thinking differently about how we help them learn?<\/p>\n
Should we be thinking differently about what it means to be a college student as we head into 2020?<\/p>\n
Should we rethink our understanding of our student population?<\/p>\n
Should we celebrate who they are, rather than thinking nostalgically about who they were ten or twenty years ago?<\/p>\n
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.<\/p>\n
Image credits:\u00a0 Gerd Altmann from Pixabay; TheDigitalArtist from Pixabay<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do you know who our students are?\u00a0 Not who our students were a decade ago, but who our students are today. If you look at the registration summary for Fall 2019 (dated 11\/4\/2019), you will see that our credit headcount is 41,232 students.\u00a0 Of that, 11,682 students were new to ACC:\u00a0 a 4.1% increase over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}