Rachel Vitello
News Editor
Keene State College is currently aiming for a deficit of 1.6 million dollars. When KSC President Melinda Treadwell took the presidency in the fall of 2017, the deficit was around eleven million dollars. Student enrollment and retention are at the center of trying to get the deficit as low as possible.
“We’ve turned, in total over the last three years, 15.2 million dollars in cost containment and our revenue has stabilized and grown by about two percent in total,” Treadwell said. “We had hoped to be balanced last year and we had missed by about 2.7 million; that was last year’s budget.”
Vice President for Finance and Administration Susan LaPanne said that a deficit happens when revenues fall short or expenses run higher than expected, thus expenses are higher than revenues will cover. “Our [the college’s] revenues are tuition and fees, our student revenues, room and board; all that stuff needs to come in a way that it covers all of our expenses,” LaPanne said.
The college has two different kinds of expenses: fixed and variable. Fixed expenses are necessary regardless of how many students are enrolled, like heat, water, sewer and electric. Variable expenses are dependent on the revenue.
“Variable expenses would be for things like academic counselors. How many students you have tells you how many counselors you need,” LaPanne said. “Same thing, to some extent, with faculty. How many majors, how many courses are you offering, how many faculty slots do you need. Some of those things are variable because they vary with the enrollment, but they don’t vary as quickly as enrollment.”
The administration is looking at where to make cuts. According to LaPanne, costs like travel and supplies have already been cut from the budget. More specifically, sending faculty and staff members to events like conferences, which are not considered necessary or contributing to the overall student experience, have also been reduced significantly. Looking forward, more cuts will be made on campus that are not directly related to benefitting the students.
“There are people who are not meaningless… but sometimes their activities no longer have meaning,” LaPanne said. “We have to ferret that out and we have to either redirect or by attrition take that person, who has value but is not doing valuable things anymore, and, when someone else leaves, put them in that slot. That takes time. We’ve cut things that we just can’t afford and that don’t contribute to student happiness.”
According to Interim Provost Ockle Johnson, another way the college is practicing fiscal discipline is by not replacing faculty and staff members when they leave their positions on their own or retire. Departments are also working on consolidating courses that are similar to each other.
“Sometimes a department might say, ‘We’ve been offering a certain course at the upper level. There’s another department that offers a course that’s very similar; it’s not exactly the same, but the students are going to get a very similar experience that will meet their educational needs.’ That’s the kind of thing departments have done in order to ensure the quality is there but deliver it with fewer faculty,” Johnson said.
This issue is not only about balancing the budget but getting the college to a comfortable financial space to have money left for unexpected future expenses.
“Think about those unruly expenses that are going to show up that we go ‘oh no, we didn’t predict that’,” LaPanne said. “We still have to be able to have the fortitude to pay those expenses and still balance the budget. So it’s really [one] million and a half plus pick a number.”
When it comes to how to conserve this money, LaPanne said that it’s all about maintaining the student experience while still being reasonable.
“If it doesn’t touch you, if it doesn’t make your experience here better, it’s on the block. Our mission is the student experience. If we have somebody doing something that doesn’t positively influence or doesn’t serve the people who are serving the students, it’s got to go,” LaPanne said. “Next year, at this moment in time, we are aiming at a balanced budget, which means that our 2.4 million dollars of last year and the year before was reduced by about one million. We have to reduce it by another million and a half.”
Rachel Vitello can be contacted at
rvitello@kscequinox.com.
