Tracking the Trends

—From the desk of Brier Albano, Associate Vice-President, Student Success 

After a tough year of surprises at every corner impacting our enrolment, the numbers are in for fall 2025. Fall enrolment is sitting at 1,771.3 full-time enrolments (FTEs) as of October 1—an increase of about 381 FTEs from 2024/25 if you compare our numbers to last year around this time. But our numbers are a bit different this year, and it’s important to know why. 

Moving to Full-Year Enrolment 

Until this year, Selkirk College was one of the few remaining institutions in Canada that still maintained term-by-term enrolment. Moving to full-year enrolment was a priority that was identified prior to COVID-19 and actioned after the cancellation of the Thesis project. With dedicated collaboration between the program chairs, deans and Registrar’s Office, we were able to accomplish an enormous feat. The shift means that many of our students are able, for the first time, to report their schedules to their workplaces in advance and provide certainty for their child’s caregivers and other life events until the end of this academic year in June 2026. However, this means our numbers look tremendous, as they account for enrolment that we would not typically expect until November.

When we look at our numbers and anticipate our growth in October after the fall start, our expert associate registrar of systems and scheduling and the Institutional Research department have calculated that comparisons to early December 2024 provide us with the best indicators of how we are doing. How are we doing? Well, we are on track with estimates and predictions.  

Tracking the Trends 

In August of this year, we anticipated domestic growth around the 2–3% mark, and the numbers seem to support this story. Using the trends around this stage of registration last year, our domestic numbers are up about 171 FTEs overall. However, we also have to account for the loss of international students. There have been ebbs and flows in that data, but at this point, we had budgeted the 2025/26 academic year for about 447 International FTEs and are currently sitting at about 415 FTEs. It’s a drop of about 185.5 FTEs from the level of enrolment we would be comparing it to in the data, but it is about on track for where we believed we would be situated with program growth in areas of federal demand.  

Informal reporting (meeting roundtable) from the Institutional Research group in BC suggests that we are one of only four colleges in the province that will be above 0% for domestic headcount growth based on early numbers.  

As we navigate the new full-year data, it’s important to understand that the numbers will come with new subjective data that’s a bit different than what we are used to. You’ll see schools like Business and Health and Human Services, where students have been eager to get registered early in advance. These schools look far larger in our early numbers than schools like Academic Upgrading and Development, where last-minute registrations are more common—not just at Selkirk College, but everywhere.  

When we look at our numbers, we absolutely consider these factors, stories and student types, and these are all trends we have the information for. This is especially true for programs where most of the applications come through Education Planner BC (the BC application system or EPBC). Recent developments in extracting data from EPBC are helping us pinpoint dates and times of the applications, determine the best times and locations to recruit, and track the regions where we want to see growth for certain programs.  

Strategic Enrolment Management Goals  

So, that gives you a snapshot of our enrolment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be providing this information to the media on request and are hoping to maintain some enrolment confidence in our community as we continue to make hard choices. The picture is coming together for our 20-by-30 strategic enrolment management (SEM) goal to see 20% growth by 2030.