The people who run Harford County's public school system are probably just a little bit envious of their counterparts at Harford Community College these days.
Unlike the public schools, which are solely at the mercy of state and county elected officials for most of the money they need to operate, if the HCC administration and trustees are running short of the money they think they need to operate, they have the option to raise student tuition and/or fees.
While true that this model has been emulated by HCPS in recent years in the form of pay-to-play, the money that comes in is small change for a $450 million school system budget. HCC, on the other hand, depends on tuition and fees for the biggest chunk of its operating revenue, some 45 percent, to fund a budget one-tenth the size, and the college's leaders have firm control over both charges, beholden only to the students who have to pay them.
Therein lies the rub, of course, because at some point the students and their families could say "enough" and go somewhere else. Not likely, perhaps, given that there aren't many, if any, cheaper alternatives if you want to get a post-high school education. Not yet, anyway.
In the fall, HCC's base in-county tuition rate will increase $8 per credit hour to $124, an increase which seems to be the proverbial sweet spot for retiring HCC President Dr. Dennis Golladay and the trustees, because this is the level at which the rate has been rising with regularity in recent years.
This will be the eighth tuition/fee increase since 2010 and is caused by two main factors: the rising costs to operate – including higher employee pay – and declining enrollment caused in part by the economic recession of the past nine years (or so HCC officials say they believe). In other words, fewer students will have to pay more to attend.
Left unsaid as a cause of the run-up in tuition during the Golladay administration is sloppy financial management. The HCC president conceded two years ago that the college was operating with a recurring structural deficit, which he in part attributed to the economy keeping students away. With prodding by some trustees, though only following the public relations debacle over fee increases at the college's public athletic complex, Golladay pledged to tighten up financial management.
The budget for 2017 the trustees approved earlier this month has no anticipation of needing to dip into reserves to balance expenditures, and there's every reason to believe Golladay's successor, Dr. Dianna Phillips, will take over in August with the college on firm financial footing, even as the total budget continues to increase. Golladay should be given credit for cleaning up HCC's balance sheet, though it remains to be seen if the problem was one of his making to start with.
The challenge to Phillips should be to keep the college financially viable without having to resort year after year to balancing the ledgers from the pocketbooks of the students. Last November, Golladay and the trustees decided to spend money on sophisticated marketing to try to boost enrollment, but the latest projection is that enrollment will decline this fall.
As we have noted many times in the past, the mission of a community college should be to provide affordable, community based learning opportunities for everyone, regardless of economic means. Increasing tuition year after year after year is not meeting that mission.