By AMANDA DRANE
@amandadrane
HOLYOKE — Holyoke Community College will need to either raise fees or lay off teachers, school officials said during a regularly scheduled board of trustees meeting on Tuesday.
Though HCC already raised fees by $8 per credit last year, William Fogarty, vice president for administration and finance, said during the meeting that declines in both enrollment and state funding are taking a toll on the budget. He said student fees need to raise $6 more per credit or the college would need to lay off 10 teachers to stay out of the red.
Fogarty said a proposed fee increase will come before the board next month.
“Obviously, we face some challenges,” said board Chairman Robert W. Gilbert. “Proper fiscal management means just maybe we can’t be the second least expensive in the state.”
Enrollment is down 15 percent since 2010, HCC officials said, in a scale that equates 1 percent to $225,000 in college revenue. Fogarty said the college is doing everything in its power to counteract the downward trends, but it’s not enough.
“The college has moved on multiple fronts on cutting costs, rallying resources and aggressively pursuing outside sources of funding,” Fogarty said during the meeting. “However, the state support handicaps our ability to meet the needs of students.”
Carlos Santiago, the commonwealth’s commissioner of higher education, came from Boston to attend the meeting, which covered the college’s financial obstacles, equity issues and HCC’s role in a push to unify schools — from K-12 schools to the state’s community colleges and universities.
For trustees, money problems were front and center.
“The realignment of funding has hit our balance sheet by $5 million,” Gilbert told Santiago, adding that state funding used to cover 48 percent of costs and now only covers 41 percent. “The future unfunded contract negotiations are going to hurt, enrollment is down … you put that all together in the sauce and it just becomes a huge problem.”
In response, Santiago acknowledged the lack of resources available in the state’s budget, but said the college should work with others statewide to stay on message — that the services provided at HCC and other community colleges are of value. “That message has to be delivered to the Legislature, as well,” Santiago told trustees.
Santiago said he’s working on a faster, cheaper degree pathway that may address some of these issues. He described a plan called the “transfer block,” which will standardize general education and even major requirements, so that students moving through the state’s institutions no longer have to contend with credits not transferring over.
“Their degrees will be less expensive if they move through faster and follow these transfer pathways,” said Santiago, who took over as commissioner last May.
Trustee Yolanda Johnson also spoke during the meeting about how the board should see achievement disparities between students of color and their white counterparts “not as a threat, but a way for us to improve systematically … particularly for students of color.”
She said that strengthening relationships with the area’s high schools and charter schools will help address the disparities. She said the community needs to “align our time and talents” to ensure that underserved students get the help they need to succeed.
“It’s good work,” said Johnson. “It’s heavy work and it has to be work that’s done together.”
According to Johnson, the college is very close to meeting the threshold for status as a Hispanic-serving institution — U.S. colleges and universities with student bodies who are 25 percent or more Hispanic, a designation which would open the college up to new avenues of federal funding.
Simultaneously, Massachusetts students are less likely to receive need-based financial support than those in most other states — the commonwealth ranks 49th out of 50 for need-based aid, Santiago told trustees.
“We need to reach out to new populations — populations that have historically been underserved in the commonwealth,” Santiago said. “Those populations are growing, yet have not been as welcomed into higher education as others, and we need to make sure that changes.”
Over one million workers, Santiago told trustees, are 55 or older and will need replacing in a decade or so. He said this puts Massachusetts’ public institutions in a unique place to “train the workforce of the world.”
According to Santiago, 60 percent of students need remedial classes before entering college-level coursework in the state’s community colleges. Under the current system, he said, most who enter remediation don’t continue to earn a degree. A pilot program, however, is testing out a new entry point for the remediation, he said. Currently, students are targeted for remediation based on an “Accuplacer” exam, but Santiago said the state is experimenting with a new process that would instead recommend remedial classes for students with an incoming cumulative GPA of anything less than 2.7.
“It gives students a better shot,” he said of the pilot program.
Santiago said that the earlier remediation happens, the greater the chances for success, which is another reason he wants to bridge gaps between high schools and colleges.
“If we can ensure students with the greatest need are helped,” Santiago said, “it’s going to help everybody else.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.