During the last few weeks of the spring 2022 semester of Bakersfield College's courses,
Professor Naomi Rutuku mentioned to her World Literature class that summer and fall
registration for the upcoming semesters had recently opened up and that lots of students were already enrolling in classes.
The enrollment data for Bakersfield College's fall 2022 semester is open to students of the junior college if they use the registration site as a role sheet in order to look at the
current numbers for individual class and course enrollment. Over the course of the third
week of May, I copied the then-current numbers for subject and course enrollments for
comparison purposes in the hopes to gain a better understanding of the relative
enrollment trend for Bakersfield College's fall 2022 semester.
Interested in comparing courses that are required for students to take as part of their
general education courses such as certain communication classes to more elective-based classes that individual majors would either have to take for their specific area of study or chose from a list of classes open to them to meet their required number of credits, I explored the differences in the then-current enrollment numbers for communication courses compared to English courses, as an English major myself I knew the severity of the courses well.
Since communication courses are required not only for communication majors but all
majors through the general education requirements, communication classes appear to
have a fairly high enrollment rate. It should be noted that these numbers' relativity is
based solely on the other enrollment numbers found from Bakersfield College's class
registration window; no administrator or staff members from the Bakersfield College's
registrar responded to queries for interviews for an expert's perspective on numbers and
help to place these numbers in context.
Out of the 36 communication classes subtitled Public Speaking that is one of the options
for the communication general education required classes 33 of them had met their full capacity of having 30 students register for the fall class, only five of these 30 classes had
all of their waitlisted seats remaining open at the time of pulling this data. All of these
courses are categorized as "Lecture/Discussion."
Compared to the public speaking course, the more elective-based communication course subtitled Health Communication had only one class in which students could enroll in, and at the time of pulling the data it had 19 out of its 30 possible seats filled. It should be noted there was previously another open Health Communication course available for students to enroll in but it appears to have been canceled: the number of seats it holds is marked "0/0 seats remain."
When looking at the English courses there is a similar pattern of the generalized courses
filling up while the elective courses range from being moderately full to fairly low. In the
English course subtitled Expository Composition that all students are required to take
there were 102 courses for students to choose from, 47 of these were already full when the data was pulled.
Comparatively, elective-based English courses such as Classic Mythology had one slot
for which students could register for, which had also already filled not only the initial 30
open seats, but also 10 additional students were registered for its waitlist. There is a
similar story when one looks at the Survey of English Literature course, there was only
one slot for which students could register for and 30 did so, and an additional four
registered for its waitlist, leaving only one waitlisted seat open.
There are some elective-based English courses that did not meet their maximum
capacity at the time data was pulled, such as the singular slots for Children's Literature
listed 24/30 seats remaining, the Survey of World Literature listed 19/30 seats remaining,
and the Survey of American Literature listed 3/30 seats remaining.
Due to a lack of response from administration, I am unable to report if these numbers are
relatively higher, approximately average, or relatively lower than what Bakersfield
College typically sees compared to previous years registration rates. Without response
from someone who knows the numbers, I am unable to report if the number of classes
that were created for courses such as Public Speaking or Expository Composition was
again relatively higher, approximately average, or relatively lower than what Bakersfield
College normally provides.
But while these numbers lack context, they do appear to be meeting one of the Kern
Community College District Strategic Plan's goals, "Decrease [w]aitlisted enrollments on the first day" by offering so many courses for which students can register for, and canceling the surplus after the fact. Without context, it is impossible to know if Bakersfield College is fulfilling the pattern in their Educational Master Plan 2020-2023 where it is stated, "Fall census enrollments have grown 17% to just under 79,000 annually." Without context, most importantly, it is impossible to know what these early numbers meant to the instructors and administration who watch them, and what it will mean for the future of Bakersfield College, not just in their upcoming fall semester, but as a whole.