PVCC Puma Press: November 2004

With enrollment rising at PVCC, growth is one of the main issues PVCC and MCCCD administrations will strive to deal with in the coming years.

The full time student enrollment, or FTSE, for fiscal year 2003-2004 was 3,971 having risen 6.6 percent since the previous year. Although this number is below the projected 7.3 percent growth, the figure caps 10 years of 5 percent or more growth and follows 6.1 percent growth last year, according to official district 45th Day FTSE reports.

The current headcount at PVCC of total students enrolled is approximately 8,600, and according to district projections that number should almost double by 2014. By that year, PVCC’s service area is projected to grow by 150,000 residents.

This area consists of those lands between Glendale Avenue on the south and the Maricopa county line on the north and between Scottsdale Road on the east and Interstate 17 on the west.

The MCCCD governing board president, Mrs. Linda Rosenthal, says the district is experiencing large growth overall, expecting it to grow to almost 400,000 students by 2010 from almost 280,000 in 2003-2004.

“Now, that is a tremendous, tremendous number of people whose lives we are affecting,” says Rosenthal.

MCCCD Chancellor Dr. Rufus Glasper says the relevancy in these numbers is that the MCCCD colleges combine to be the largest career training facility in the state.

The main challenge posed by the growth in the district and, more specifically, at PVCC is space. According to Rosenthal, PVCC is facing a space crisis, which if unchecked, may affect the quality of the PVCC experience.

Rod Fensom, director of marketing and public relations at PVCC, says that the space shortfall has not yet affected the marketing strategies of PVCC. However, it may cause the school to employ advertising strategies that focus on program-specific advertising in for those areas that can better handle increased enrollment.

Presently, the administration is using a tactic that Fensom refers to as “time-shifting” to handle the space shortage. He says classes are being offered later in the day so that students still have scheduling choices.
The next step, according to Fensom, to deal with growth, will be to initiate more drastic schedule alterations. He says that PVCC may have to offer more classes on Fridays, weekends and evenings, along with late-start, concentrated or faster classes.

Most administrators agree that the ultimate answers for PVCC’s growth challenges are adding more buildings to the campus and expanding the campus to other locations. The goal of administration is the passage a district-wide bond amounting to almost $1 billion.

According to Arlen Solochek, acting director of facilities planning and development for the MCCCD, passage of the bond includes a plan of $84.7 million in total expenditures for PVCC. Seventy-two million dollars will come directly from the bond and will add new buildings, renovations and the construction of the PVCC North campus. The rest of the money will be spent on technology and facility needs. This will occur over the next 10 years.

Rosenthal says that looking back 10 years to the last bond election in 1994, one can see that buildings in that package are now here completed.

In their letter featured in the MCCCD Publicity Packet for the bond, former state senator, Joe Eddie Lopez and wife, Rosie Lopez, both volunteers for the previous bond, say one of the arguments against the bond is that the original plan that was voted on changed after the bond passed “thus breaking (the district’s) promise to taxpayers.”
Solochek says, however, if growth did continue at its current rate, and there were no additions to campus to accompany this growth, the campus may end up turning students away because of lack of available space.

Jane Saldaña-Tally, PVCC dean of administrative services says plans for additions to PVCC will not add an abundance of space, but enough to maintain the present quality of education to its students. She says that for fall semester the square footage available per full-time student equivalent is 69 square feet at PVCC, while the district average is 100 square feet. The district’s capital plan for the next 10 years will maintain PVCC at 69 square feet per FTSE.

Saldaña-Tally also says that PVCC is not just the only college without a second location, but the north campus will be necessary to service far north valley areas like Carefree and Cave Creek, which will experience a lot of PVCC’s service-area growth.

The land for PVCC North is already owned by MCCCD.