Last month the College of New Caledonia announced it is cutting 10 full-time faculty positions, including three pending layoffs, with seven other faculty members accepting early retirements or voluntary severance.
CNC has a fixed layoff date and all layoffs for full-time staff for the following term must be announced before March 31. But they are not yet finalized and the Faculty Association of CNC is working with college administration to try to retain the three instructors in full-time positions before the layoffs take effect on Aug. 1.
“We pretty much know there’s a partial workload for at least two of the three people who have been given notice and we’ve got four months to find a full load,” said George Davison, secretary-treasurer of the Faculty Association of CNC.
Faculty members with roughly two-thirds of a workload are considered full-time and will retain their employment benefits. Davison said the affected instructors will try to top up their workload by replacing instructors who retire, go on sick leave or choose to take course reductions. The college and the faculty association began negotiating staffing levels in October and Davison says those discussions resulted in fewer reductions than were first proposed.
“We’ve gone through this almost every year at CNC,” said Davison, a 31-year history instructor at CNC who joined the FACNC executive in 1992. “It used to be kind of joke that the college would have a deficit in March and a balanced budget in the summertime, but they’d have laid off a bunch of faculty.
“We weathered UNBC coming on and actually held our own ground pretty well until the early 2000s when the Liberals came in and changed the way the institutions were funded. They started cutting back on operating funding and forcing institutions to make money in other ways, and basically that was tuition.”
The province’s de-regulation of tuition fees in February 2001 ended a six-year freeze on increases and within two years tuition costs jumped 25 per cent. That continued in 2003-04 when the average annual tuition went up 30.4 per cent. In the five years from 2000-2005, tuition increased 88 per cent until the province bought in its tuition limit policy which capped annual increases to two per cent.
Davison said CNC has found creative ways to get around the two per cent annual limit. In April 2015, as part of its $2.8 million budget reduction, the college announced it was suspending its dental hygiene and dental assisting programs to save money. That prompted a community outcry and the two-year dental assisting program was saved but the hygiene diploma program was put on hold a year.
“It was, scrap the program, revamp it and relaunch it with two or three times the tuition,” said Davison. “(Dental hygiene) used to be a two-year program for about $9,900 with never an empty seat and they took in two sections of 16 seats in the program, and it went to $30,000.
“When I came (to CNC) in 1990, government operating grants made up 85 or 90 per cent of the college’s revenues and tuition was about 10 per cent, now it’s about 30 per cent. Tuition revenues have gone from a couple million dollars a year in a $40 million budget to $17 or $18 million a year in a $75 million budget.”
Davison is past-president of the Federation of Post Secondary Educators of B.C., which represents college instructors, and spent 10 years in Vancouver on the executive of the provincial organization. He’s approaching retirement this fall and is not teaching this term, but remains active in the FACNC on its negotiating committee.
Having been close to the pulse of the faculty association throughout his college career, he says CNC has a history of targeting high-cost, low-enrollment technology programs to make budget reductions. As a result, the college lost programs in wood processing technology, survey technology, engineering graphics and design, electronics, and computer information systems.
“They were hands-on programs and they needed up-to-date equipment,” said Davison. “They were smaller than a university-transfer classroom that has 37 (students) and if they couldn’t get 15 or 20 students it was a problem for the program.”
Budget restraints have also reduced its elective course options for university transfer students. When he started teaching history at the college, students had their choice of 19 courses. There are now just four.
“At one point they said they were going to cancel history and geography and I said you can’t do that, this is supposed to be a comprehensive community college,” Davison said.
CNC has struggled to keep its enrollment numbers healthy ever since UNBC opened its Cranbrook Hill campus in 1994. In the years leading up to that, Davison said close to half (1,200-1,400) of the college’s full-time equivalent students were in university transfer programs. Graduated high school students from the area would typically study two years at CNC then move on to universities in other cities. Since UNBC’s arrival, both Prince George schools have tried to work together on university transfer programming to avoid duplication of courses, but there have been setbacks.
An example is CNC’s 2 ½-year nursing program, which funnels students directly into the third- and fourth-year programs at UNBC. Davison said the college program was thriving in the early 1990s when there were 20 faculty members teaching between 250 and 300 students at CNC and UNBC. But the profession changed its education standards and it became a four-year degree program, requiring all instructors to have masters degrees. As a result, 14 CNC faculty either lost their jobs, retired or moved on.
