Wayne Community College happy with budget
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on September 24, 2015 1:46 PM
The news may not sound good at first -- tuition is going up and enrollment is slightly down -- but Wayne Community College President Dr. Kay Albertson had nothing but praise for how community colleges fared in the recently approved state budget.
"You know that the budget has been signed by the governor," she told the board of trustees Tuesday night. "We know through our own conversations with the system office that we're still working with our projected figures because the state Board of Community Colleges must approve those General Assembly allocations prior to them being distributed to us."
The state board will not meet again until the third week in October, at which time the "real numbers" will be fleshed out, she said.
"And so, at the November meeting, you'll have a lot of stuff to approve because we will have those exacting numbers," she said. "I know that's been very confusing. It's hard for us, but it is the way it is. We have a lot to do between now and then. But we do know that the budget has passed.
"I have to give lots of kudos to the final numbers from the General Assembly. They were very good to the North Carolina community college system."
She explained that the college will be funded for the summer across the board for all courses.
"We know that there is money set aside, $10 million this year, $20 million next year, for salary increases, not just for faculty, which at one time is what they talked about, but for faculty and staff because you can't make a college run without some staff members either," she said. "They funded us for a number of those items that we asked for, which we'll talk about more in November.
"I say we need to praise our legislators for that. They listened to us. And so it's not nearly as dire as it could have been."
One thing the General Assembly especially paid attention to was a tuition increase, but not in the way one might expect.
"There will be a tuition increase for our students, but sometimes it's been retroactive so they want us to bill for the fall semester after you've already used the old tuition dollars and try to collect that," she said. "Well, it's impossible.
"So what was decided is tuition increases will not begin until the spring semester so that makes it easier for the student services side, for financial aid, to bill those students at the appropriate time. So that is a good thing, too, that occurred."
While it may not seem to be a positive, she said they are inevitable and will streamline how billing is done.
The tuition is expected to go up $4 per credit hour, or $76 per credit hour for curriculum classes for in-state students, she said.
As the new fall semester gets underway, the president said the college doesn't have a good handle on enrollment figures yet since there are several registration periods remaining. Continuing Education is "constantly enrolling" in response to industry, business and community need, she said, so those final numbers will not be known until semester's end.
"In curriculum we will have one more registration in October. We offer eight-week courses but we also have registration every four weeks in our developmental, remedial, what we call our pre-curriculum courses," she said. "I will have those numbers for you, the total numbers for you in January at the January meeting.
"But I did want to share with you at this particular juncture our curriculum enrollment number is 3,423. It is only 10 students below what it was last year at this time."
The dip is reflective of what is happening at community colleges across the country, she noted.
"That's not necessarily a bad thing because there's an uptick in jobs," Mrs. Albertson said. "I'm sure that there are other reasons for declining enrollment but that is the one statistic that we're fairly comfortable with and so, again, across the N.C. community college system we're seeing declines.
"If we can maintain our numbers from last year, we're delighted. And for us only serving one county, that's pretty doggone good."