By Sarah R Baker
“This is going to be a difficult budget year for us, maybe the worst in my 23 years here at Peninsula College,” said Rick Ross, Associate Dean for Athletic and Student Life, “but we have an outstanding student leadership team and I’m confident they’ll do everything they can to minimize harm to programs as they establish a budget for next year.”
The Student & Activity (SNE) fees the Associated Student Council collects through tuition is down close to $45,000 below projections. This is due both in part to a decline in enrollment and the recoding of international students, who are no longer required to pay the fee as part of their tuition.
Ross and other budget managers alike are being asked to “tighten their belts” in cooperation and only spend funds on items of high importance. The ASC promptly canceled their retreat, the beach clean-up in Forks and La Push, student field trips, including a trip to Seattle and a Mariners game, and they won’t be able to grant funding requests for clubs for the rest of the year. However, Ross assures that the Spring Bash is still taking place, as well as the annual chalk-drawing contest.
“It’s a delicate issue. I wouldn’t call it a crisis,” Ross said, “but it’s definitely a difficult situation.”
He isn’t kidding. Enrollment at Pen- insula College has been dropping consistently since 2010.
The amount of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) class loads, that is, all enrolled credits divided into fifteen-credit blocks, taken at PC during the 2010-2011 school year was at 1799. For the next few years it decreased until it dipped into the 1600’s in 2014, 1500’s in 2015, and finally, now during the 2016-2017 school year, it has reached an alltime low of 1387.
This doesn’t just impact the ASC. It affects student life altogether, as clubs have been stopped dead in their tracks in terms of funding and all nonessential events will have to be canceled.
However, Peninsula College isn’t alone. It seems that this decline in enrollment has been suffered statewide, the only exceptions being Bellevue College and Highline College (whose population has only been growing as of the 2013 school year).
The recoding of international students certainly doesn’t help either. For every credit a student takes, $9.10 is added to their tuition as a Student & Activity fee, the primary revenue stream for the ASC’s budget. An FTE counts for $136.50 in SNE fees alone.
The exceptions include Running Start students, who take college classes that count toward a high school diploma, and now of course, international students. Essentially, an entire group no longer participates in activity funding.
This information was only handed down to budget managers within the last two weeks, mean- ing this year’s budget was built on $506,500, though Ross as well as other advisors were expecting a $480,000 fee income, and to borrow a small amount from PC’s Cash Reserves. Unfortunate- ly, the fee income actually came in at $435,365.
This is when the mandatory belt-tightening occurs. Groups, clubs and classes are working to eliminate nonessential expenditures and prioritize activities so as to keep the budget as afloat and functioning as possible.
Vice President for Finance and Ad- ministration Deborah Frazier put it into simple terms: less students means less money and less budgeting to operate. She says the solution is to advertise the online Associate of Arts degree and the online Bachelor’s degree.
“Our typical student is a 28 year old single mother with two kids working full time,” said Frazier, “we need to figure out how to find those people, how to get through to them and then make our programs available to them.They have a lot going on with work and kids so the online solution just makes sense.
“The age of traditional college goers, those usually right out of high school, has been declining for years. The age bracket now is between 25 and 44. We need to learn how to get to that slice, which is difficult because they’re not represented proportionally and they’re not educated proportionally.”
Outside of these parameters, the solution includes out-of-district recruitment as well. 2,000 students is the determined yearly enrollment the college needs in or- der to keep afloat in terms of tuition fees and funding.
However, according to Frazier, it’s more of an arbitrary figure. Nevertheless, with traditional “college going” age drop- ping and the decline of in-district enrollment, it’s obvious that the 1387 FTE num- ber needs to be raised for the following year for the possibility of a comfortable budget.
That’s where out-of-district and international students come in. Then again, without the SNE fees the international population used to pay, the pressure is on more so than it has been previous years. PC needs that many more international students to compensate the loss.
“We need them. There’s not enough people here and to keep education going for people on the peninsula,” said Frazier. Recoded students inadvertently caused the budget issue, but their recruitment is also the solution.