Rural Community Colleges Live Paycheck to Paycheck

Last Friday, Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed General Assembly Republicans’ mini-budget bill over concerns about the private-school voucher funding it contained. But the bill also provided much-needed funds to North Carolina’s community colleges.

The money–$64 million to support enrollment growth and nearly $13 million in tuition receipts–is now held up until at least October 9, when the legislature reconvenes and could potentially override Cooper’s veto.

Until then, community colleges are stuck waiting for that money. How are they making do in the meantime?

We called Dave Loope, the president of Beaufort County Community College, to ask. 

What does the delay in that funding mean in practice for you and Beaufort?

We are absolutely more reliant upon the funding we receive from the state than both the larger community colleges and certainly the public universities. 

Our college has the largest geographical service region of any community college in the North Carolina Community College System. We serve 2,100 square miles in four counties. Those four counties are Beaufort, Hyde, Washington, and Tyrrell counties. Two of them are the smallest in population, and yet some of the largest in terms of geographical size. 

Those counties rely on us for all of their public services training—fire, EMS, and law enforcement, for example. And you can imagine that if you live in rural Hyde County, and you have a fire that breaks out, you can’t wait for a fire truck to arrive from Washington in Beaufort County or Manteo in Dare County. You need assistance then.

The budget delay prevents us from being able to serve the populations in these extremely rural, remote counties. We can’t move forward with new training without assistance coming in the form of new money. 

And the same is true of business and industry. We rely on the money that we get from the state to be able to meet the needs of expanding services, the business industry, and in particular workforce development. 

The issue is that we’re funded one year in arrears, and we all accept that—that’s how we operate. But as smaller colleges and rural colleges frequently lack large foundations, we have less unrestricted private money that we can use. So it has put us in a situation where we are on hold.

With the changes to your funding model and the FAFSA delays and now this funding delay, there is a lot of uncertainty. How are you navigating all of that? How are you working with your staff to not just be on hold the whole time?

First of all, we do what we can to continue operating at a high level of success for our students in terms of retention and graduation rates. None of that stops.

We have in place the Beaufort Promise Scholarship that helps pay for tuition and fees for most of our students, and that’s why we’ve grown faster than any college in the entire system other than one. We’re committed to continuing to provide the type of financial aid that we’ve always provided for our students, and increasing that where possible. Those are not necessarily funds coming from the state.

The FAFSA delays were unfortunate, but we have dealt with those fairly successfully, I think. It made enrollments a bit uncertain in the beginning of the semester, but the system office was good to work with us, as was the State Board of Community Colleges, to enable us to move through that difficulty. 

I think that we’re looking at different types of problems, and while they certainly are connected to some extent, what we have to do is approach them individually and try to solve them as such. 

But this particular issue with the delay in receiving state funding is a bit of a different animal, because it’s something that we have to be patient with and work with our delegations in the General Assembly and see what we can do to get them to work towards doing the right thing in order for us to be able to move forward. 

The funding model changes I don’t see as anything that stands in the way of us receiving the money from the General Assembly for enrollment growth. I feel very confident that moving into the new session, we’ll have an opportunity to make what can be achieved through Propel NC very apparent. 

What do you think comes next? It sounds like the answer might be Propel NC. Is there anything else to add?

Well, I think we’ve got to work with our partners in business and industry and in the counties that we serve, including the public school systems, to enable them to understand how our funding mechanism can sometimes result in this sort of delay. 

We have to sometimes wait for the process to work itself out in order for us to have the money to do what’s required. That’s particularly more difficult for many rural colleges, because we operate on an extraordinarily tight budget. 

Even though we were up 7.2 percent [in enrollment] last year, we’re not seeing any of the benefits of that yet because of the delay. 

I think many people fail to understand that we’re funded one year in arrears. Unlike the public schools, certainly, or the universities that quite frequently have enough money set aside in institutional funds or from their foundations where they can sometimes make up that gap, we don’t really have those luxuries. For us, it’s living almost paycheck to paycheck, if you want to put it that way.

We do the best we can to increase our enrollment. When we increase our enrollment, that means that we are increasing the type and number of services to our partners in the community, and that costs more money, so we have to hope for and expect that within a reasonable amount of time we are reimbursed for that so that we can keep moving forward in the subsequent year.

We all know that’s what we live with. It’s not new. It’s just particularly frustrating sometimes that we can’t always move forward immediately and adapt immediately, which is the hallmark of our mission in the community college sector.

Is there something you think you’ve done particularly well in responding to these issues that you want to recommend to other colleges?

For us, the dramatic difference we’ve made in our small, rural college that has enabled us to grow by a good 500 budget FTE [full-time equivalent students under the budget formula] in the last few years is that we removed the barriers that prevent students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds from attending college. And that means finding a way to pay for tuition and fees.

We’ve increased our enrollment each year. And each year, the population in our four-county region continues to decline. But more and more people are seeing us as a choice because we’ve been able to work with our local county partners, especially Beaufort County, to help us with tuition and fees, because they understand the necessity of breaking down those barriers for access, which in turn, tends to keep people closer to home. So we’ve been able to, in some ways, curtail the out-migration from our region, or at least slow it down.

So my recommendation would be to seek private sources of funding. Look in the private sector for assistance where possible, for federal grants where possible, and certainly from your local county commissions where possible. 

That’s how we’ve approached this delay in receiving state funding, at least to some extent. But it’s not enough to make up for the slowdown in starting our new programming for this academic year, which we had planned to do in July.