Photo By: Josiah Ann Nelson

This fall semester marks the highest credit-student enrollment at JCCC in a decade, reaching 18,849 students.  

Amid statewide declines in community college enrollment, JCCC is an outlier with an increase of 217 students (1.2%) from last year, marking its largest enrollment since 2016. This is contrary to a collective Kansas decline of 1.9% this fall.  

This figure highlights other fall increases: first-time student enrollment rising to 8.4%, part-time enrollment 2.1%, and high school student enrollment 3%.  

According to JCCC President Dr. Tony Miksa in a press release about the enrollment achievement, many factors attract students and bring them back to campus, supporting these trends. 

“Students continue to choose JCCC because of the quality, affordability, and flexibility of the educational opportunities we provide,” said Miksa. “These enrollment gains reflect our commitment to helping students start, continue, and complete their educational journeys while preparing for meaningful careers and transfer opportunities.” 

In her press release, Public and Media Relations Coordinator Emma Swinney noted a spike in retention which improved to 70.6% for first-time, full-time, credit-seeking students. JCCC attributes this to the implementation of initiatives derived from the Strategic Bridge Plan, including a mandatory student orientation, success coaching and academic advising opportunities, and Guided Pathways, an Ivy League-developed college-redesign framework for students to explore potential academic and career goals. 

“The idea is that you get to test out some classes that are interesting to you. They’ll group similar academic and career fields. So say you want to be a nurse, but you’re not sure if it’s nursing or if it’s dental hygiene for you. You could take something in there, and it would still count towards your major,” Swinney said in an interview.   

The upward enrollment trend and initiatives that support retention have only accelerated Miksa’s goal to recruit 40,000 students, with 20,000 credit-seeking and 20,000 continuing education, as per his 40-40-40 by 30 plan, in addition to increasing the graduation rate to 40% and raising $40 million by 2030.  

“We all contribute to that by anytime somebody that’s interested in the college, we connect them up with the people that they need to be connected to to get them enrolled,” Miksa said about his recruitment mission in a video celebrating his first year as president.  

As of now, that goal seems to be on track, with four years remaining.  

“At least since I’ve been here, there has not been a time where we have gone down from the previous year, so I think a lot of that when it did go down was COVID-related, for obvious reasons, but I really do think that we’re going to get there with just everything that we have been doing as a school,” Swinney said.  

According to Swinney, high school students involved in JCCC through dual credit courses have been a great contributor to enrollment, especially in the future.  

“We have great first-time student enrollment, which is super exciting, but a lot of it is conversion of people who started here when they were a high school student, and they did College Now classes, and they did dual credit,” Swinney said. “We’ve seen an uptick in students who have decided that they want to enroll in JCCC after experiencing us a little bit, so that has been pretty cool.” 

 This increase in high school student enrollment, as well as high school students transitioning to  JCCC credit-seeking students afterward, is observed in the midst of a national trend named the enrollment cliff beginning in 2025, which denotes a decline in traditional college-age students due to a lower birth rate following the 2008 financial crisis. 

 “So over the next 10 years, colleges across the country have been preparing for this enrollment cliff, and that’s like all these colleges are going to be fighting to enroll students, and that’s something we’ve talked about here, and a huge part of our enrollment comes from Johnson County, so we’re not like those other higher ed schools where we’re looking at enrollment from around the country, but it’s interesting,” Swinney said.  

 As high school seniors are in the midst of college enrollment season, the marketing and admissions departments make outreach to prospective students possible, with Program Director of Admissions Lisa Turner-Hernandez overseeing the recruitment team and student ambassadors, who help facilitate the transition to college.  

 Recruiters and student ambassadors have varying roles with overlap in making prospective students feel welcome with high school visits, college fairs, tours and events to talk and present about JCCC programs, student life, and next steps. The admissions department also works closely with Student Life to host campus visit events like Discovery Day, CavConnection, and Noche de Colegio to recognize the major resources of JCCC, as well as the recent addition of success coaching under the admissions umbrella to assist first-year students through their first semester. According to Turner-Hernandez, the latter helps to “provide a more seamless transition for students.” 

 “[Students] meet with [success coaches] for orientation and really learn about the resources on campus and how to be a successful student and talk through things like, ‘What are you gonna study?’ ‘How much time should you be studying?’ ‘What are my next steps if you need placement testing?’ ‘How does all of that work?‘ Really explaining how to college, which is so much harder than people give it credit for,” Turner-Hernandez said.  

Helping students find their way at JCCC with the host of resources is a major aspect of the school that motivates prospective students to enroll.  

“I think that everybody at JCCC does such a great job of really making students feel welcome and helping them thrive, and that’s what makes this place different. Our job is to get people here to experience that, and then they fall in love,” Turner-Hernandez said.  

To learn more about JCCC’s trend in enrollment, follow up on press releases from JCCC’s Media Contacts and Releases page.