Adult education enrollment dips

For Arturo Luengas, a young prep cook from Mexico City, his course in English and technology at Truman College in Chicago could help open doors one day to a managerial position.

"Before this course, I didn't know how to use computers. I was afraid of them," Mr. Luengas says. Now, he writes essays on a word processor and e-mails his friends in Mexico. It's been worth a few hours per week, he says, because he is "not afraid anymore."

With enrollment down 17 percent from last summer, public schools in Brookline have hiked fees by 6 percent and eliminated more than a quarter of their course offerings. At the Cambridge Center, enrollment is down 10 percent from this point last year, with almost every area from writing to investing taking a hit.

"We're part of the economy, just like everybody else," Smith says, "and people don't have as much money to spend on classes."

In other types of programs and in certain course areas, however, the economy has produced a fresh crop of students. The drawing card seems to be classes that help people cope - emotionally as well as financially - with a tough economic times.

"How to Survive the Coming Depression" was a hit this season at the Cambridge Center, as were courses on changing careers, buying foreclosed property, and supplementing income by starting a dog-walking business.

Such "work life" courses have enrolled 25 percent more students than a year ago at the Cambridge Center. Yet in Brookline, courses in résumé-building and networking have been flat. "If you've been out of work for a year and a half, you've been there and done that already," says Linda Larson, director of adult education for the Brookline Public Schools.

High school students in Florida who flunked classes this year have flocked to adult-education centers this summer in lieu of summer school programs, which disappeared in the last round of state budget cuts and showed no sign of being revived.

In Brevard County alone, enrollment for the past year has increased from 8,000 to more than 9,700, which adult education director John Wigley attributes primarily to the various new summer-school offerings.

Yet despite certain sectors with strong enrollments, educators are concerned that the current economic downturn could reshape the adult education landscape with some regrettable contours.

As enrollments drop, fees must go up to cover costs, Ms. Larson says.

An example: A 16-hour photography course that cost $95 last year is up to $103 this year. What's more, enrollments tend to be slow to recover, even after the economy revives.

Larson's program needed almost eight years to regain the ground it had lost in the recession of the early 1990s. And in an age when public dollars for education are increasingly scarce, she says, adult education may become more and more the domain of those who can afford it.

"The sadness of this recession is that it really is making much more of an elite program," Larson says. "In the long haul, this is [damaging] to our mission."

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