North Iowa Area Community College is seeing continued enrollment growth, according to NIACC President Joel Pedersen. Pedersen tells RadioOnThe Go News the college has recorded enrollment increases in headcount and credit hours for four consecutive semesters, including a boost of more than 1,600 credit hours this semester.
“We even saw a little bit of an increase in some of our adult learners. So that’s always good too, because I think that that’s one of things we always want to do as a school is really be here for everybody. And so maybe there’s an adult learner that maybe lost an opportunity at a job and then we can retrain them and get them right back into a better situation. Yeah, so we would say that similar trends and we’re hopeful that those will continue even though we’re gonna have the same data that shows less people graduating or less births going back to the financial crisis in 2008. So yeah, it’s good news and hopefully that will continue.”
This comes as Iowa community colleges recently reported a return to pre-pandemic enrollment levels. The Iowa Department of Education’s 2025 Fall Enrollment Report showed statewide enrollment rose to more than 88,500 students, with registered credit hours also increasing from the previous year. Pedersen says affordability, smaller class sizes and strong advising continue to attract students, while retention efforts help keep them enrolled.
“When you put all those things together, really, like I said, take everybody where they’re at. Maybe they’re ready for a three-week welding class. We start them and then maybe they go from that three-week class and they say, ‘listen, I really like it here, so I want to continue.’ So I think that’s the beauty of the community college too. We can change things and make changes with our curriculum, I think pretty quickly because of our model. I just think it connects. We have that technical side of things where we’re training HVAC technicians, we’re training nurses. And then we’re also giving people that maybe want to get their first two years done and then go be a teacher or they want to go do something in a medical field. So I think it’s just really trying to be there for lots of different needs.”
Pedersen says the college hopes the upward enrollment trend continues as more students look to community colleges for affordable and flexible education options.
Full interview below
