Case Study: Houston Community College preserves enrollment and accelerates Hurricane Harvey recovery with Bluescape

How Houston Community College Navigated Hurricane Harvey with Bluescape

Houston Community College (HCC), a 23-campus community college system, faced a sudden enrollment crisis when Hurricane Harvey disrupted registration events, closed facilities, and scattered faculty just weeks before the fall term. To increase situational awareness, coordinate dispersed teams, and avoid an anticipated loss of nearly 2,000 students, HCC selected Bluescape and leveraged Bluescape’s Situational Intelligence capabilities and a secure virtual master workspace to centralize emergency-response content, data, and planning.

Working with Bluescape, HCC built a customized workspace that combined a planning timeline, hurricane and advisory data, daily enrollment tracking, employee outreach tasks, and meeting agendas so teams could collaborate in real time, tag assignees, and run after-action reviews. Using Bluescape’s platform, HCC started the year with a record-breaking 57,120 enrolled students, minimized withdrawals, had a campus recovery plan in place before the second week, and produced a repeatable crisis-response framework—demonstrating measurable improvement in enrollment retention and operational coordination.

Houston Community College