NMJC enrollment on the rise
Levi Hill/News-Sun
Enrollment is booming at New Mexico Junior College, so much so the college is looking at building a new on-campus student housing facility.
The NMJC Board of Directors voted unanimously Oct. 16 to select Dekker Limited as the vendor to design and oversee construction of the new student housing facility on the campus.
Joe-Mike Gomez, procurement officer for NMJC, said the selection of Dekker now opens the college up to begin negotiations for the cost of services.
This comes at a time when enrollment at NMJC is reaching new heights, increasing 9.4 percent since the 2020-21 school year when enrollment numbers plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Bill Brown, vice president for Institutional Research, Planning, and Effectiveness.
Cathy Mitchell, interim NMJC president, told the News-Sun the numbers aren’t quite at pre-COVID levels yet, but are getting close.
“I think it is typical of colleges across the U.S., but more so here in the oilfield area,” she said of the enrollment increase.
Brown said enrollment for the 2024-25 year, which includes fall, spring and summer semesters, reached 2,780 students taking a total of 47,000 student credit hours.
The number of credit hours taken by each student also increased slightly, with total hours up by 14.4 percent. Brown said 44 percent of the students in the 2024-25 year were full-time students.
The majority of students are in the 18-24 year age range, with 19 being the median age, Brown said, adding most community colleges have a median age of 23.
“The two-year graduation rate is 37 percent,” Brown said. “When we look our graduation rate around the start of COVID, it was around 29 percent.”
He said the college is looking beyond the 2-year mark because many students are taking longer to graduate.
“We are looking at typically students who come here, stop, take a little longer,” he said. “We are starting to look at the six-year graduation rates and what we are finding is a substantial increase in graduation rates when we look at four or five years out.”
For the 2024-25 year, Brown said the college awarded 475 degrees, up 32 percent from five years ago. The number of students receiving degrees also climbed by 27 percent, up from five years ago to 405 students.
Since opening, the college has issued 16,000 degrees to 13,000 students, Brown said.
Christopher Gonzales, academic success coach for the Department of Student Success at NMJC, discussed the 2025-26 year enrollment numbers, citing a current enrollment of 2,396 distinct students for the fall semester.
“We have had five consecutive semesters of positive enrollment growth,” Gonzales said. “Students are taking more credit hours. The average number of credit hours are up from 10.3 to 10.4. The majority of students are full-time — 50.4 percent — 49.2 percent in Fall 2024 were fulltime.”
Demographically, female students continue to dominate the ranks of NMJC’s student population with 64 percent of students identifying as female and 35.6 percent as male.
However, Gonzales said there has been a small increase in the number of male students in recent semesters.
He said 61.4 percent of students at NMJC identify as Hispanic, an increase over 2024 and double the national average.
Members of the Board of Directors asked for more detailed information about what is driving some of those demographic changes.
“To sustain those numbers and the uptick, it is important to understand why we are seeing those increases,” said board member Manny Gomez. “Why are we seeing the increase in enrollment?”
Brown said no study has been done to determine why there is an increase, but said the college has been working on reorganizing its outreach and recruitment efforts and the enrollment numbers have been climbing since that work began.
