March 18, 2025 | 4:00 am
On the clear-skied Monday following spring break, Houston Community College’s Katy campus didn’t take long to come back to life. By 10 a.m., hundreds of cars nearly filled the expansive parking, students sprawled out in study areas on each of the campus’ three floors, and a busy flow of students streamed in and out of the polished campus.
Over the past five years, enrollment at HCC’s Katy campus and other parts of Houston’s sprawling suburbs has swelled, with a couple thousand additional students signing up for classes. The growth has been fueled by students like first-year paralegal technology major Sebastian Szatynski, who moved to the Houston suburb from New York several months ago to attend HCC’s fast-growing Katy campus.
“It’s cheaper and easier here. I like the ease of access. I’m going to transfer to the (University of Houston) right after finishing my associate (degree) here,” Szatynski said, pointing toward the UH satellite campus located across the street.
In the city’s urban core, however, enrollment has fallen by several thousands of students during the same period. The losses are most severe in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods on the west side — such as Alief, Eldridge, Gulfton and Westchase — where residents were already less likely to earn a college degree.
The enrollment trends mark a stark shift for HCC, a 51,500-student college that historically educated large shares of inner-city students but now relies on more students from the outer edges of its service boundaries, a Houston Landing analysis shows. While the booming suburbs have helped HCC bounce back from a pandemic-era decline and stabilize its budget, the inner-city losses risk exacerbating education disparities in Greater Houston.
For HCC leaders, much of the shift is a natural consequence of population and development trends, as well as the nationwide decline in college enrollment after the pandemic.
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