NIC: Soaring enrollments, falling funding

Priscilla Bell, president of North Idaho College, is making her budget presentation to JFAC this morning, and her news is dramatic: Student enrollment, measured by total head count, has soared from about 3,500 when she started at the college in 2007, to some 6,700 this spring. “We’ve almost doubled our head-count in the four years I’ve been here,” Bell said. But at the same time, state funding for NIC has been dropping. Under the governor’s proposed budget, “By fiscal year 2012 it will be at 2001 levels.”

Because NIC is funded by local property taxes as well as student tuition and fees and state funds, the falling state support will impact both property taxes and student fees, on which, Bell said, “We have to rely more and more.” No decision has been made as yet on property tax levies for the college next year, but Bell said the college has statutory authority to increase its levy by 3 percent a year, and it’s done so every year she’s been at the college. Student tuition and fees also have risen every year, though the impact has been diffused because of the college’s shift over two years to a per-credit basis for its tuition. During the shift, that’s meant bigger increases for part-timers than for full-time students. “So now when we do a tuition increase, it will be the same percentage across the board for all students,” Bell said.

Since 2001, NIC’s student enrollment has grown by 106 percent, Bell told lawmakers, and property taxes to support the college have grown 112 percent. At the same time, state funding has dropped back down to the 2001 level. Gov. Butch Otter’s budget proposal for Idaho’s community colleges next year calls for an additional 1.7 percent cut in state support, on top of the earlier decreases. Now, Bell said, “Full-time faculty are teaching on average two classes more than their normal load every semester. On the non-faculty side, we have not increased our staff for several years.” That means, she said, that “the same number of staff struggle to meet the needs of more and more students.”