Local community colleges are bracing for another year of stripped-down budgets, even as enrollment grows to nearly 100,000 students.
Northern Virginia Community College, on six campuses with 72,000 students, has seen a 24 percent enrollment growth over three years without corresponding funding increases.
“We’re stretching the resources we have,” said President Robert Templin. “We’re starting classes earlier in the morning, running them seven days per week, going later in the evening and offering more online learning — with the hope that students who take that option are learning effectively that way.”
Annual tuition increases at the school, commonly called NOVA, have hovered near 10 percent since the start of the recession, up from about 7 percent increases in years prior, Templin said.
NOVA receives the bulk of its funding from tuition and state funding. A state board will set next year’s tuition in May.
Total cuts to all of Virginia community colleges since fiscal 2008 have amounted to more than $63 million, partially mitigated by federal stimulus funds, said Ellen Davenport, who lobbies on their behalf in Richmond. When stimulus funds run dry by 2012, the budget hole could reach $105 million, she said.
In Maryland, where local dollars fund up to half of community college budgets, Montgomery College officials are preparing for a more than 10 percent drop in per-student funding to $11,700 from $13,000.
The college requested a $6.2 million increase from the county to manage the current year’s 7 percent enrollment increase — the college’s largest ever. Instead, County Executive Ike Leggett proposed a nearly $15 million decrease, bringing the total budget to about $203 million. State funds, too, will fall next year by about $3 million, to about $35 million.
The cuts “will have a devastating impact on the college’s ability to meet the record demand by county residents,” wrote interim president Hercules Pinkney. “In the current economic climate, Montgomery County needs its community college more than ever before.”
