CSCU faculty and staff unions are calling for the governor and lawmakers to find a way to stop tuition from increasing.
So what are the people on the front lines exactly saying? NBC Connecticut's Mike Hydeck spoke with Seth Freedman, the president of Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges. He's also a professor at Capital Community College.
Mike Hydeck: Alright, so first up, this rate hike has been discussed for months. It's been signaled, what are we going to do, we have budget concerns. When you heard the 5% this week, was it more or less than you expected?
Seth Freeman: Well last year, the tuition hikes were about 5%. So we weren't surprised at the number. And so it was probably what we expected.
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Mike Hydeck: And so you said, was this 5% last year? That was what was discussed, or it is now 10% over two years?
Seth Freeman: Well, it will 5% last year. So yeah that would be 10%.
Mike Hydeck: What do your members think could close the gap? It's clear that there is a funding problem with our state colleges and universities. Instead of a tuition increase, what would you like to see instead?
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Seth Freeman: So we understand the tuition increases, along with the service cuts that have already been made this year as part of the same problem. And the problem is the failure, frankly, of Governor Lamont and our legislature to properly fund our public higher education system in Connecticut. This has been a problem for many years. It's not unique to Governor Lamont. This has been a problem for many years, whereby public higher education in Connecticut has been underfunded. So the result of that underfunding are the service cuts we've already seen this year, which had been too drastic and deep and raising tuition on our students. So as our state reduces the amount that we fund public higher education, we shift the burden of public higher education onto the backs of our students and our families.
Mike Hydeck: When you say it's underfunded, do you mean resources? Do you mean bodies? Do you mean curriculum? And how does something like that change? They have noted to the people as they're doing the numbers, they say, 'look, it's declining enrollment over the last several years,' so there's a reason why that formula makes sense. How do you respond to that?
Seth Freeman: So we flatly disagree with that. When you cut services and you raise tuition, both of those are enrollment, right? So I'll just give you an example right now, Mike, on one of our campuses. So right now, at Manchester Community College, we have zero recruiters. So we understand recruitment and admission staff, they're responsible for going into the community, going into high schools. So when you cut recruitment staff, when you cut marketing, when you cut services and then you don't have the resources to help enrollment grow, or when you cut advisors, and you cut courses, that impacts retention. So when our state cuts services, and that impacts enrollment decline, and then we say, 'because enrollment is down, we're gonna fund you less,' we see it as kind of a self perpetuating cycle. So we flatly disagree and furthermore, I'll just say enrollment has stabilized. And we believe our enrollment can grow. So our faculty and staff don't have the same, I guess, understanding of that as an issue.
Mike Hydeck: So the previous president Mark Ojakian, he saw this coming, he tried to consolidate. The way he pitched it was, 'look, we need to do this to save money.' Maybe we have fewer people in administration to overlook a broader umbrella of schools. What's your contention? Did that work when it came to saving money or no?
Seth Freeman: No, it didn't work. It's clear that the merger was designed to save money, and it didn't, because you don't save money when you just hire a new level of administration, right? So it didn't save any money.
Mike Hydeck: Well they dispatched… so there used to be a president of each individual community college.
Seth Freeman: There still is. There's a CEO of each campus, right? So we still have basically the same campus manager. And now we have more system managers. So increasing management and increasing the administrative overhead. But our faculty and staff, just to be clear, you know, strongly pointed out the flawed with the plan. And unfortunately our legislature and back to kind of our legislature and our state government, were not willing to really listen to faculty and staff. So now we see that after going through this merger, and we're obviously committed to making Connecticut State Community College successful, but after going through this merger, and after not saving any money and after not improving services, because now we're again, cutting services. Now this current budget that was passed last spring is basically almost kind of decimating our services. So that's why the faculty and staff opposition is so strong, not just to the tuition hikes, but to the broader service cuts that are happening.
Mike Hydeck: So it all is about, in your mind, more state funding, period.
Seth Freeman: Period. Well, we understand deeply who's impacted when we cut public higher education, right? It's working class students. It's low income students and in our community colleges, it's students of color. 55% of our students in Connecticut State Community Colleges are students of color. So when we choose to underfund public higher education, we know deeply, because we work with our students, who's hurt, and we know how much that obviously hurts our students, but it hurts our state. It hurts our economy. It's short sighted. We're cutting job placement services right now.
Mike Hydeck: Well, we have 90,000 jobs open in Connecticut, so we need to do something about that.
