Editor’s note: This commentary is by Lou Colasanti, of Bristol, who is a member of the CCV faculty and its union.
[A]t the end of January, the newly formed union of Community College of Vermont faculty entered into negotiations with the Vermont State Colleges to bargain for a first contract. The hope and expectation was that, while there would likely be points of disagreement, the process and the outcomes would reflect an effort by all parties to negotiate in good faith and fair dealing. That hope quickly withered when, in response to the union proposal for equal pay with the rest of the part-time faculty in the VSC, the administration’s counter-proposal came back with a $25/credit increase, less than the cost of inflation.
Like most schools these days, CCV and the VSC plead poverty when it comes to equitable pay for teachers. Part of the reason usually offered for this is the decreases in state appropriations, which, in 1980, provided nearly half of the operating costs for the VSC, but these days, have dwindled to roughly 15 percent. Yet that decrease in state funding has not translated into less revenue. The difference has, unfortunately, been more than made up by giving Vermont the dubious distinction of having the highest public post-secondary tuition in the nation.
According to The College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges, at $7,980, the cost for attending a two-year, public college in Vermont is the highest in the nation — nearly twice the national average of $4,234, and more than five and a half times the cost of attending the least expensive schools in California ($1,430). Moreover, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, of the 888 public, two-year degree-granting schools in the country, Vermont students, paying out-of-state tuition and fees, can choose from nearly 40 percent of those schools as a lower-cost alternative to CCV.
That high cost is probably one of the main reasons why NCES data also show that, while Vermont can boast one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation (88 percent, 2015), we also have one of the lowest rates for those continuing their education beyond high school (53.2 percent, 2012). (Only six states and D.C. have lower numbers, and among them, neither D.C. nor Alaska has a public community college system.) To make matters worse, of those who do manage to continue, only a quarter (26.2 percent, 2012) continue in their home state, placing Vermont at the very bottom on that measure.
With the highest in-state tuition for public community college in the nation — tuition which accounts for roughly 80 percent of CCV’s operating revenue — it’s a fair question to ask, then, what that money is being spent on, and whether CCV and the VSC truly cannot afford equal pay for CCV faculty without raising an already-too-high tuition.
For starters, even as CCV has been increasing its online offerings exponentially over the past number of years, that has not kept the college from investing significant funds in brick and mortar, including the largest facility, the Winooski campus. The irony, of course, is that the convenience and popularity of online offerings has meant a concurrent decline in the need for the classrooms and facilities this brick and mortar house. Nor has the supposed lack of funds kept CCV from growing its management staff. At a time of declining enrollments — which, coincidentally, CCV administration have cited as the primary reason for cutbacks in teaching loads for senior faculty — things were evidently not so dire that CCV could not find the funds to grow its management staff by six full-time positions in just the past couple of years. That brings the total to 83 full-time management staff, or more than three times the average of the other community colleges which CCV itself selected for comparison in its latest report to NCES. In addition, while CCV is required to set aside 2.5 percent of operating costs as a reserve fund, it has set aside more than 7.5 percent for that purpose, a laudable conservative fiscal approach perhaps, but not exactly a practice that squares with a lack of funds. Add to that resources already expended on the recent “strategic planning” initiative, and the planned costs coming out of that for enhanced marketing and “branding,” and the “lack of funds” argument begins to seem more selective than one might at first imagine.
Unfortunately, one area where we can be assured that CCV is not spending money is on faculty or students. In that same report to NCES, CCV reported spending $3,783 per full-time equivalent student (FTE) on instructional costs, or less than 60 percent of the average $6,343 of its self-selected comparison schools. Those numbers look even worse when we compare CCV spending with the other schools in the VSC – Castleton, Johnson/Lyndon, and Vermont Tech — where instructional costs per FTE student average more than $8,500. To add insult to injury, where CCV had set aside a mere $316,000 for scholarships and fellowships in 2015, just a bit over 1 percent of total expenses, and insufficient to offset the exorbitant tuition, by 2018, that fund had been cut in half, to $150,000, a meager 0.55 percent of total expenses, and less than 12 percent of what the college is currently spending just on servicing its debt.
Finally, under the current conditions, there is the question of equitable distribution of the already-limited allocation from the state. The policy of the board of the VSC is to distribute state funding equally to all the schools within the VSC. On first blush, this may seem reasonable. But it bears absolutely no relation to the realities on the ground.
Since 1980, overall enrollments in the VSC have increased roughly 80 percent. But enrollments at CCV increased nearly 230 percent in the same period. The result is that in 2015, CCV accounted for roughly 40 percent of all in-state FTE enrollments in the VSC — more than Johnson, Lyndon and Vermont Tech combined. And while many CCV students are part time, still, they accounted for more than half of all students in the VSC system, and nearly two-thirds of all in-state students in that same year. In this light, an equitable distribution of state appropriations would mean CCV would receive more than twice what it currently receives as its share of state funding.
To put that in some perspective, that share would not only be enough to establish pay and benefit parity with the rest of the VSC part-time faculty, there would also be enough left over to increase scholarships and fellowships twentyfold, from $150,000 to more than $3 million. Plus, all the management staff, including those recently added, can still keep their jobs.
Ultimately, of course, the hope is that the Legislature will wake up and pay a bit more attention to its own findings, set forth in its Report of the Higher Education Subcommittee to the PreK-16 Council, submitted to the Vermont General Assembly in December 2015. With adequate funding, we may yet see a tuition-free community college system here in Vermont, with all that it can mean for students, parents, the workforce and the state’s economy. Meanwhile, a fair contract for CCV faculty and a twentyfold increase in scholarships and fellowships for students can already become a reality without adding to existing taxes.
The money is already there.
