[T]he Vermont State Colleges System is ending the fiscal year with an estimated $1.8 million surplus, however its enrollment struggles continued to drag down revenue.
Final, audited numbers won’t be out until October. But VSCS chief financial officer Steve Wisloski told trustees Wednesday that a preliminary analysis of last year’s books revealed a much rosier financial position than the system found itself in the past two years, which both ended in multi-million dollar deficits.
“It is hard to sort of get one’s head around not seeing rivers and rivers of red ink,” he said.
Wisloski added that two pots of one-time funds in fiscal year 2018 helped the system, which includes Castleton University, Vermont Technical College, Northern Vermont University and the Community Colleges of Vermont.
The schools saved money on fewer insurance claims and also allowed Castleton University to use one-time federal grant dollars, he said. Without those two items, the surplus would have instead been a roughly $300,000 deficit.
And VSCS Chancellor Jeb Spaulding also noted the Legislature increased funding for the system by $3 million for the past year.
“If we had been level-funded, we would have been in a different situation right now,” he said.
Otherwise, the system continued to struggle with enrollment last year. It took in $961,000 less in tuition and fees than it had expected, and $1.1 million less in room and board. It also spent $900,000 more on scholarships than anticipated in a bid to recruit or retain students.
But the colleges also significantly tightened their belts last year, cutting wages and benefits by $2.1 million. That number doesn’t include all of the anticipated savings from much-publicized layoffs at Castleton, Wisloski said, because some of those took effect later in the year.
Church Hindes, the VSCS trustee chair, thanked the school presidents for being willing to make tough decisions.
“Most of this good news did not come through over-flowing revenues or surprise income, it came about because of the hard work of you and your team in terms of controlling expenses and absolutely reducing expenses,” he said. “And that came at the expense of members of the college families and we have to acknowledge that that was not an easy thing to do.”
Trustees also took a first look at this fall’s enrollment, although numbers aren’t final since students are still matriculating.
Vermont Technical College has 1,339 full-time students currently enrolled, about on par with last year, according to president Pat Moulton. At NVU, current numbers show a steep drop in enrollment. But officials said the data was faulty, and would soon be updated. It didn’t reflect, for example, 114 students the school would officially enroll in its master’s in clinical mental health counseling within the next couple days, president Elaine Collins said.
And overall, Collins said the newly-minted school – which was created from the consolidation of the Lyndon and Johnson states colleges – was in good shape.
“We may be a little below where we wanted to be in the budget, but if you look at where we’ve come from, it has been an amazing year,” she said.
At Castleton, the school appears to have turned a corner – the school has 707 new undergraduate and graduate students, a 22 percent increase over last year. In total, there are 1,868 full-time students enrolled, a nearly 4 percent increase from last year.
The school, just miles from the New York border, had been worried about the impact of a new tuition-free program being offered in the Empire State’s public colleges. But Castleton president Karen Scolforo said new articulation agreements the school signed with campuses in the SUNY system — giving certain students in one system guaranteed admission into the other — had actually been able to draw New York students into Vermont.
“I think sometimes when these things happen we turn away from them because we’re like, ‘oh well, this is happening, let’s focus over here.’ Where sometimes the best solution is to head towards it,” she said.
