By Eric Trent
The Washington State legislature has changed funding processes for colleges that will result in less state funding for Peninsula College.
“The way the formula works is there’s a direct connection between the state Full-Time Equivalent target,” Deborah Frazier, vice president of administrative services, said.
Students taking 12 credits or more are considered an FTE, so in some cases, it takes two or three part-time students to equal one FTE.
“The state sets an overall target for all colleges,” Frazier said. “And within the system, they allocate that out to each one of the colleges.
“Those targets have not been adjusted in, nobody can remember how long.”
For example, Clark Community College in Vancouver, Wash., has been growing exponentially while Peninsula College’s enrollment has stayed roughly the same.
Despite Clark gaining students, their funding has stayed the same over the last 10 years.
State legislatures plan to take 200 FTE’s worth of funding from Peninsula and redistribute them to larger colleges.
Fortunately, the target set for Peninsula is 1,560 FTE’s, which is about how many Peninsula currently has.
“It’s a more realistic adjustment to what we’re really doing,” Frazier said.
This formula will be reevaluated every three years to accommodate enrollment changes.
There are also smaller changes within that system that will work toward Peninsula’s advantage.
“There’s a bare minimum service level needed in order to run a college, and a dollar value attached to that,” Frazier said. “All colleges get the same amount of money for that.”
“For us that’s good, because it means we get that much money spread over fewer people,” she said.
Overall, state money for Peninsula will go down, but tuition is pretty much the same because Peninsula will produce about the same amount of students each year.
“There’s no tuition increase this year for associate-level classes,” Frazier said.
However, tuition will be cut for the four-year programs.
“Their tuition is going down 15 percent,” Frazier said. “But that means we lose $1000 per FTE, because of that.
“So there’s another $50,000 or $60,000 that won’t come in.”