The provincial government has approved Camosun College and other public post-secondary institutions in BC to run at a deficit for two fiscal years due to a decrease in revenue resulting from the COVID-19 crisis.
Camosun is approved, along with 19 other institutions, to run a deficit up to $178.9 million for fiscal year 2020-21; it’s approved, along with 16 other institutions, to run a deficit up to $75.2 million for fiscal year 2021-22.
Camosun vice president of administration and chief financial officer Deborah Huelscher says the college is still working with the $6.7-million deficit projection it made public in January, as well as a deficit projection for next year that Huelscher suspects will be smaller than the current projected deficit.
“We’re just about to enter into March; there are a lot of accounting entries and things that happen at year-end,” she says, “so it could be a little bit higher, it could be lower.”
Huelscher calls Camosun’s cost-saving measures, which will allow the college to continue to provide programs and services to students, “quite austere.”
“It’s allowing us to maintain the current level of programs and services,” says Huelscher. “We did make a few reductions in services, but that’s about what we’re offering on campus.”
Huelscher—who says other post-secondary institutions have been in a deficit in the past, but Camosun hasn’t—says it’s been challenging to keep as many services as possible going at the college.
“People are doing a really great job,” she says. “We just don’t know what the patterns are going to look like.”
The college has had to use a variety of cost-saving measures to navigate through the crisis, such as a reduction on travel, the implementation of salary freezes, and layoffs, including temporarily suspending Continuing Education. Huelscher says that some positions at the college have had to remain empty in order to keep up with the cost of programs and services.
“Internally, we’re taking some of the impact because we’re trying to make sure that we reduce as much as possible and give back to our students,” she says. (Huelscher could not confirm what positions, or how many, are currently empty.)
With the deficit approval, the college has been given time, says Huelscher, to figure out what the future may look like.
“Our hope is that we’ll see that [enrollment] improvement come fall. For us, international enrolment… provides a significant revenue source to us, but we need to return to a balanced position at the end of two years; we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to have more students when we get to fall, but we don’t know what that will look like on campus yet,” she says. “We are predicting a deficit for next year, but balance beyond that. That will change as we progress through the year and we see what happens with vaccines.” Huelscher says that getting back into investments once things stabilize is key for the future of Camosun.
“We don’t have extra dollars to invest in initiative projects and those sorts of things,” she says, “which are important because they move us forward, but we’ve been focusing on what’s absolutely essential.”