Howard College Health Care Enrollment Grows
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As it works to make higher-education opportunities available to a 13-county service area, Howard College looks for new and innovative ways to expand its offerings. Its most recent successes have been in its health professions programs area, where the Vocational Nursing Program and others are so popular that the school’s San Angelo and other four campuses are seeing huge surges in enrollment.
“In the last two years, we have hit the top 50 colleges in the nation for our size in terms of enrollment,” says LeAnne Byrd, provost of the San Angelo campus. “We’ve got about 3,600 students enrolling for the fall or spring semesters, and about 2,000 of those are in San Angelo.”
The vocational nursing track has been particularly popular, with 175 applicants for 60 available slots during the last enrollment period. Because Howard College will go no higher than a 10-1 student to teacher ratio, that cap will stay in place until new facilities and clinical teaching sites are brought online. The same is true for the school’s respiratory-care program, but both are likely to be expanded sooner rather than later.
“Our hospital partners have been awesome and extremely helpful, but right now there’s only so much space,” Byrd says. “But we’re graduating those students and also growing our surgical-tech program through agreements with medical centers in Odessa, as well as our new radiology program. We’re adding programs a the request of our hospitals and clinical sites, who need people trained in these areas, so we’re going to be growing even more.”
All this activity, as well as other programs that will be coming online in future months, have given Howard College an enhanced role in local and regional economic development efforts. But Byrd says that’s less about the school being out front and more about its ability to respond to needs.
“We’re trying to put people into areas where they’re needed,” she says. “We design programs that provide those employees, that provide people who can come out and go right to work. We are always trying to be very cognizant and aware of what the businesses and employers near us are wanting and needing, and to be able to respond quickly to that.”
Story by Joe Morris
