Enrollment at state four-year and community colleges has dropped, but the number of graduates has improved, state higher education officials told legislators Monday in the annual presentation of the state Higher Education Report Card.
Higher Education Policy Commission Chancellor Paul Hill said enrollment peaked in 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
"Then, it started to decline as more people got back into the workforce," he told the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability.
Also affected by declining numbers of state high school students, full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 64,427 students in 2011 to 61,042 in 2014, a decline of more than 5 percent, according to the Report Card.
However, a total of 9,269 bachelor's degrees were awarded in 2014, up from 8,886 degrees in 2011.
Meanwhile, bachelor's degrees in health-related fields jumped nearly 26 percent from 2010, while degrees in STEM majors - science, technology, engineering, math - increased more than 12 percent during the period.
"These are growing fields in West Virginia, and the message is getting out to students," Hill said of the high-demand degrees.
Hill said part of the improvement may be that colleges are emphasizing having students who need remedial education enroll in credit-earning classes and receive additional academic support, as opposed to taking no-credit development classes, given the historically low graduation rates for students who take developmental courses.
A total of 46.8 percent of students who enrolled as freshmen in West Virginia colleges in 2009 graduated within six years, with graduation rates ranging from 55.7 percent at West Virginia University to 19.6 percent at Bluefield State College, according to the Report Card.
Tuition and fees have also increased, the Report Card noted. From 2005 to 2014, average in-state tuition has increased 67.6 percent, to $6,211. According to the Report Card, colleges in the Southeast region saw in-state tuition increase by 74.4 percent during the period, to an average of $7,498.
Meanwhile enrollment at the state's community and technical colleges dropped 20 percent from 2009-10 to 2014-15, from 36,039 students to 28,752.
However, according to the Report Card, total numbers of two-year associate's degrees awarded during that period increased from 2,250 to 2,842.
Overall, just 29.5 percent of CTC enrollees earn a degree within five years, a factor Council for Community and Technical College Education Chancellor Sarah Armstrong Tucker attributed to having adults 25 and older make up 47 percent of CTC enrollment.
"You have a lot of folks who have been out of school for a number of years," she said.
She added, "Unfortunately, our graduation rates are pretty consistent with what you see across the country. They aren't any worse."
Reach Phil Kabler at philk@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1220, or follow @PhilKabler on Twitter.