Due to the COVID-19 crisis, Camosun College was at one point preparing for losses in its 2020-2021 fiscal year for between $10 million and $15 million, says Camosun chief financial officer Deborah Huelscher. While those numbers could still be a worst-case scenario, the college is also now looking at a best-case scenario of a $4.5-million deficit of the college’s total revenue for 2020-2021, which, in the year’s budget summary, was $150,016,525.
“It is what we’re projecting to end the year at,” says Huelscher. “It could go up, it could go down. We’re still actually working through the quarter-two results; obviously we don’t have winter enrollment yet, so we’ll have to re-visit the assumptions.”
On June 30 of this year, the college announced they were at least temporarily closing the doors of Camosun’s Continuing Education department, and announced other layoffs. Huelscher says that the college doesn’t have any plans for additional layoffs at this time.
“Our belief is that we’re incurring a deficit of that amount so that we can continue to provide the programing and services that our students expect and deserve,” she says. “We did not want to start cutting to an extent that impacts our delivery right now, or impacts our ability to grow and recover in the future. The sector as a whole is in a deficit position, and that’s just the reality, I guess, of our situation. It doesn’t serve our students; it doesn’t serve faculty and staff if we make cuts just to maintain a balanced position.”
The Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training supports the college being in a deficit position, says Huelscher, and the Camosun College Board of Governors understands and supports them as well. Executive salaries have been temporarily frozen as a cost-saving measure.
“We’re in a situation I certainly never imagined,” says Huelscher. “We seem to be in a second surge globally, but for us, we’re sort of working on a year [-to-year basis.] We’ve done well with our fall enrollment; we hope we’ll do the same for winter. We don’t know beyond this first year, but our hope is that we’ll be able to maintain this level of operation.” (Most international students stayed in Victoria over the summer, which helped international enrollment, although it still dipped.)
There are lots of costs to running a campus, says Huelscher, that simply cannot be avoided even though the majority of students are off campus this semester.
“We have fixed costs tied to our buildings, and some of those costs continue,” says Huelscher; “not a lot of savings there.”
It’s not easy to decide what goes when trying to cut costs, says Huelscher, considering about 80 percent of the college’s costs are tied to salaries and benefits.
“Obviously, our people are very important to us, so, you know, that’s the last place we want to look,” says Huelscher. “The public service has frozen salaries for college execs, so no decreases, but there’s no performance increases for the next cycle.“
But being able to reduce costs in areas such as travel—which can be quite significant, says Huelscher—is resulting in savings (it was the “low-hanging fruit,” she acknowledges). As an institution, she says, we’ve done well in saving portions in areas where revenue has been lost, she says, such as parking.
“We’re not getting the parking revenues that we would have in the past, and we’re also saving on some of the cost,” she says.
During times like these, Huelscher says executive teams come together and brainstorm ways to get through it.
“What we did do, though, is we certainly put a hiring freeze in place; we look at every position we’re going to fill… that’s all we can do,” she says. “You just keep looking. And you go with what has the least impact on students.”