Just eight months ago, the College of Western Idaho was looking at enrollment well short of initial projections.

The grim forecasts led one local blogger — government watchdog Dave Frazier — to declare the as yet-unopened community college a "faltering venture."

Times have changed quickly. With 3,400 students, CWI's enrollment has nearly tripled from its inaugural January total of 1,195.

With that comes a new problem, and not necessarily a bad problem: dealing with the walkup traffic that tends to show up at the beginning of a community college semester.

“We know that nationally there’s a trend that community colleges will get 40 percent of their enrollment the two weeks prior to school, so if we’re sitting with 3,000 students now and that’s only 60 percent of the total we’re going to get, how are we going to handle the influx in the next two weeks?” CWI President Bert Glandon told the Idaho Business Review.

“There is no precedent for this. Someone referred to it as drinking out of a fire hose — there is just no history for this anywhere. We are really kind of pioneering new ground everyday.”

In fairness, we're now getting our first complete set of numbers quantifying the demand for a community college in Southwest Idaho. This is the first "traditional" academic year for CWI; fall classes opened a week ago. The new numbers also reflects the shift of Selland College of Applied Technology programs from Boise State University to CWI.

Two years ago, Ada and Canyon county voters raised their property taxes to create CWI — a 68 percent vote of confidence. Supporters were swayed by a mobilized and persuasive campaign that pointed out that Southwest Idaho was one of the largest regions in the nation without a community college. The fall enrollment numbers suggest the voters were right in addressing this shortcoming.

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