NEWS FILE PHOTO Medicine Hat College is seen in this undated photo.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Cuts to the Alberta Campus Grant in the 2020-21 provincial budget mean Medicine Hat College will have to lay off some staff, president Kevin Shufflebotham says.
The overall grant was cut by 6.3 per cent, although MHC’s was reduced by just 1.7 per cent, which Shufflebotham says comes to $540,000 in practice.
He said although MHC “has been incredible stewards of their resources,” gone are the days when the school could simply absorb a half-million-dollar cut.
“It’s absolutely significant,” he said. “Positions will be impacted … The exact number, we don’t know, but we’re already having conversations.”
He expressed confidence the college is well-positioned to weather the storm, touting MHC’s 10-year strategic plan that was passed this month.
“The decisions we make will support that strategic plan and have minimal impact on our students,” Shufflebotham said. “I can’t stress that enough. Every decision we make at the college focuses on students and so will our budget decisions.”
A tuition hike is coming in September, as was planned in the wake of cuts in October’s budget.
“Students will pay more – seven per cent more – than they paid last year,” Shufflebotham said. “It’s the expectation from government that we find other revenue streams.”
Fewer staff on campus wouldn’t necessarily impact students’ learning, he said.
“It depends where the staff come from,” said Shufflebotham, adding that layoffs wouldn’t “necessarily” be confined to administration.
“There’s two sides of the house – the administration side and the student-facing side. What government’s saying is that we need to maintain frontline services for the students, that we can’t impact the student experience, so if there’s courses, for example, that students aren’t enrolling in, we’ll look at those courses and that could impact faculty positions.
“Everything is on the table.”
Infrastructure maintenance program funding, which took a hit in the 2019-2020 budget, with MHC losing out on $1.3 million, has been restored to 2018-19 levels, Shufflebotham added.
Ministry of Advanced Education spokesperson Laurie Chandler told the News the grant allocations are based on data from the U15 and CAUBO, which rank the financial information of post-secondaries across the country.
Colleges and universities “asked that we use these data sources,” she emphasized.
“Each institution in Alberta was compared against another institution either within Alberta or another province based off the following: size, enrolment, demographics, programming, etc. in order to determine the level of taxpayer funding that is appropriate.”
Shufflebotham said the government has signalled its intention to continue reducing the grant over the next few years, in line with the MacKinnon report on the province’s finances’ recommendations.
“This is really just the start,” he said.
[…] Originally published in the Medicine Hat News […]