Why WA community colleges are about to see their funding change

SEATTLE – At Spokane Community College, President Jenni Martin is preparing for a $7 million budget reduction over the next six years. A three-hour drive southwest, Chad Hickox, the leader of Walla Walla Community College, is bracing for his own $3 million cut.

It’s a tall order amid a precarious time for higher education: The Trump administration is cutting federal grants and state dollars are tightening. And while enrollment in community colleges has rebounded since the pandemic began, it remains behind 2019 numbers.

Thousands rely on community college as a transition to the rest of their careers: They are the first stop for teenagers on their way to university, or adults who want to switch careers to vital fields like nursing and dentistry. And even in the best of times, they are notorious for running on shoestring budgets.

Yet both college leaders describe the cuts as necessary, even if initially painful. The money they lose will contribute toward an overhaul of the way the state’s 34 community and technical colleges are funded. The switch will take effect next summer, and it will redistribute millions of dollars among campuses – giving some colleges a financial boost while cutting into others.

“This money is really following the students,” said Martin.

For years, Washington’s community colleges have received funding based on enrollment targets that the “overwhelming majority” of schools were not meeting, according to the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Those benchmarks, set years ago, stayed the same even as enrollment plummeted during the pandemic.

The result was a kind of quiet distortion: If several hundred students left college A and enrolled at college B, both schools would see no difference in the amount of money they’d receive.

A group of college presidents spent two years studying how to improve the formula. Their consensus: Funding should reflect actual enrollment, but in a way that wouldn’t punish a single bad year. The presidents brought their proposal to the State Board, which approved it unanimously in August.

Any funding gains or losses will be realized gradually over the course of six years.

The impact of the new funding model will be mixed for schools in the Puget Sound region. Seattle, Bellevue and Highline colleges are projected to benefit, while Shoreline, Tacoma and Clover Park Technical colleges are anticipating a loss of funding. The State Board said it could not share exact figures for each college since their status could shift from losing to gaining by the time the ink dries.

The new model calculates an enrollment target based on the four-year rolling average of each college’s student body, plus how that trend compares to the rest of the system. This enrollment-based funding is the largest part of each college’s allocation.

“It doesn’t save money,” said Choi Halladay, the State Board’s deputy executive director for business operations. “Basically, it moves the money around.”

In interviews, some community college presidents facing cuts were optimistic this new model would eventually turn in their favor because they foresee enrollments climbing.

“We enjoy tremendous support from our community,” said Hickox, of Walla Walla.

The board also approved other updates to the model. It raises the baseline funding every college receives from about $2.8 million to nearly $3.8 million to reflect inflation and fixed costs. The “safe harbor” provisions that account for expensive programs, such as welding and nursing, will remain.

As the group of presidents drew up their proposal, they avoided focusing on how individual colleges would fare. This was to ensure fairness and keep any politicking away from the process.

“The thought was that the result would be something legitimate, and we wouldn’t have people jockeying for a system based on advantage or disadvantage,” said Hickox, who was co-chair of the task force that drew up the model.

But for those working in the state community college system, it is of paramount importance how individual schools fare under the model. At Shoreline, which enrolled around 5,400 students last year, many staff were shocked to learn their campus is expected to absorb a $3.5 million cut.

The school was already under a hiring freeze trying to address state and federal budgets, as well as lost tuition revenue over the years, including an 11% decline in international student enrollment this year.

It was frustrating to learn that these cuts were happening at a time of “so much stress and attack,” for community colleges, said Madeleine Gorges, a psychology professor at Shoreline.

“It pits schools against each other instead of having a greater sense of community,” she said.

Shoreline Community College President Jack Kahn abstained from voting on the changes to the funding model. While he agrees schools serving more students should get more resources, he was concerned about “making a systemic change to funding without a systemic plan for impact on our students and communities.”

The school’s head count has been increasing slowly since the pandemic drop, but its service area is one of the smallest in the system. It only covers the city of Shoreline and neighboring Lake Forest Park. The pace of bounceback will always be slower compared to other schools that cover larger geographic areas, or bigger cities, Kahn argued.

That will make it difficult to outpace other community colleges. How quickly a college can grow its enrollment, compared to others in the system, is a key metric in the formula.

“I believe community college education is valuable regardless of whether an area is growing,” said Kahn. “Many of the workforce programs needed for the state are quite small and expensive.”

He would’ve preferred a discussion of which programs needed to be protected to ensure people around the state could access the same services.

The new formula doesn’t dictate which programs colleges must change or protect. And, if the system has a particularly bad year and most lose enrollment, Shoreline could get more money if its enrollment is stable.

Several schools that will gain money aren’t expecting any sort of massive cash infusion. At Yakima Valley Community College, the estimated extra funding will total about $100,000 over six years. The school is dealing with the same headwinds as all of its peers, including the loss of federal grants. Its focus will still be on retaining students, said Teresa Rich, interim president of the college.

“The new allocation model better positions us to do our work going forward,” Rich said. “And with more accountability.”