Many believed the college closest to the World Trade Center, the Borough of Manhattan Community College, would experience heavy setbacks in enrollment after the attacks. They were wrong. A year after five students and three alumni were killed in the explosion, students are flocking to the college and setting enrollment records.
“We’ve never had this high of an enrollment,” said Tricia Lin, a professor of English at the college. “We had all these speculations, but the college has done a pretty aggressive campaign [at getting students here]. It’s been advertised on the subway and on the New York City buses.”
The college will enroll 18,000 students this fall, an increase of 1,000 over last year. While the school is experiencing a record number of students, it still has to deal with one fewer building, which was heavily damaged in the attacks.
The 15-story Fiterman structure had just undergone a $60 million renovation to add a computer lab and 40 classrooms.
Debris from the explosion blew out a wall and scattered throughout the building. Manhattan Community College is still deciding whether to renovate or rebuild the structure. Estimated cost to rebuild is $200 million.
Part of the City University of New York system, Manhattan Community is two blocks from the World Trade Center. Nobody on campus was killed in the attacks.
The five students and three alumni who died in the attacks either worked at the World Trade Center or died in the rescue attempts.
In the attermath of the attacks, Manhattan Community College was used as a recovery center for aid workers. Since then, it has been commended by various government agencies for its service.
After the attacks nearly 600 students dropped out of the college. It reopened Oct. 1 of last year, with the campus still thick in smoke and dust. By spring, enrollment was back to normal.
“I really think it was done to kind of give this illusion of normalcy in this area, and stability,” student Dennis Farr told the Associated Press. “People who were saying, ‘Oh, the air is fine,’ were coughing while they were saying it.”
Manhattan Community College President Antonio Perez said the downturn in the economy is a critical factor in why enrollment is up. Perez said when the country is in recession, community colleges tend to fair better. Lin agreed with Perez.
“There is another factor, I think: they’ve lost jobs,” Lin said. “It’s typical [that] when the economy is down, we always have a few more students at the college.”
