Last year’s graduation was held in a socially distanced celebration on top of the school’s Harvard Ave parking garage
Capitolhillseattle.com/Source: Seattle Colleges
Seattle Central will not be shutting down its campus, closing its doors, and ending its run of 56 years of providing education on Capitol Hill.
But tough numbers will mean hard decisions.
The Broadway school is experiencing ongoing challenges that echo with familiar problems of the pandemic.
Lives have been turned upside down, behaviors have changed, priorities are altered. Falling enrollment and challenging budget forecasts will mean changes with the campus and its siblings in the Seattle Colleges system. The problems are not new and have dragged on since the first COVID restrictions. A “Strategic Budget Reductions and Future Planning Task Force” completed its work long ago.
But the trends have stiffened.
“The declining enrollment trends that necessitated the task force’s work have worsened this year, placing us under greater financial stress,” Terence Hsiao, vice chancellor of finance and operations at Seattle Colleges tells CHS.
The school’s student-run news outlet The Seattle Collegian reported on some of the latest tumult including some play by play of Hsiao’s recent videoconference recapping the system’s financial challenges — and an eye-catching headline: Seattle Central to close its doors in 2023?
The answer, of course, is no… probably. School officials tell CHS there are no plans to close the college.
Total enrollment of full time students in the Seattle College’s three campus system fell to just over 15,000 in the 2019-2020 school year continuing a longer term pattern that has seen full-time enrollment drop 15% in five years.
The school’s lucrative international student enrollment has also cratered:
The ongoing pandemic has driven numbers even lower. Full-time enrollment dipped again across the system in the 2020/2021 school year, dropping a whopping 13% across the system led by a 16% drop at Seattle Central where housing costs are highest. Seattle South dropped 15% while Seattle North fell only 5%.
The task force formed for the 2019-2020 school year produced recommendations for cutbacks and reductions that continue to reverberate through the system and guide near-term financial planning for the campus.
The financial impact will continue to play out in a fashion similar to other services hit hard by the pandemic where state money forms the base of the organization’s budget. In the case of Seattle Colleges, about two thirds of the $135 million or so required to support the system annually comes from Olympia.
Like bus service that is doubly hit by weakening state or federal support and the loss of fare revenue, Seattle Colleges is planning to make do with less. Revenue forecasts from the schools’ enrollment, the international student programs, and Seattle’s Running Start program continue to drop about 4% a year while state allocations were forecasted to dip to around $86 million, also down another 4%.
At the center of the system, Seattle Central will face continued cuts and reductions and socially distanced graduations will continue. Its hopes for growth and new facilities will likely be delayed. But it won’t be shutting down.
“In my 24 years in the state of Washington, no community college in the system has closed its doors,” Roberto Bonaccorso, director of communications for Seattle Central, said.
UPDATE: Seattle Colleges has provided a presentation from a recent meeting of its board of trustees outlining the most recent updates to the financial challenges faced by the system that includes forecasts showing Seattle Central is on track to lose nearly $10 million in the 2021-2022 school year under the current budget and policies. The study examines strategies to overcome the shortfalls including growing enrollment, cutting 15% of administration, and “restoring” class size by reducing the number of classes offered and available instructors.
“Seattle Central has been around for more than 50 years, weathering many ups and downs, and we will continue to serve our community in the future,” Bonaccorso tells CHS. “That said, our college and the entire Seattle Colleges District is looking at ways to cut costs and increase enrollments. We will make those decisions with the goal of serving our students, our community, and continuing the pursuit of our mission.”
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Oh I hope things can turn around for Seattle Central! This school changed my life, supporting my achievement of a Bachelors in Applied Behavioral Science (Class of 2021)! This college offers the opportunity for a profound educational experience at a fraction of the cost of its neighboring Universities. The faculty are wonderful, and the support services are vast. Off to explore Alumni donations now; thank you for the awareness CHS!
Maybe this is an opportunity. There has been a lot of talk of making community college free for all Seattle h.s. seniors, and I wondered whether they had the capacity for that influx. Apparently, they do.
Who will pay for that? Either the state gives them more money for their operating budget or the state pays free tuition for many more kids, but the dollars don’t just appear magically.
This began a year or so ago, and is called the Seattle Promise – all graduates of a Seattle Public Schools high school are eligible for 90 credits free in the Seattle Colleges system (North, Central, or South): https://www.seattlecolleges.edu/promise/about
Sadly I presume the numbers in the projections include these enrollments.
It is beyond ridiculous that city residents who graduate from private high schools aren’t eligible for the Seattle Promise program. Some private school students attend on scholarship. Shouldn’t they be eligible? Some public high school students are just as wealthy if not more so than many private high school students, yet they are eligible while their private high school peers are not. If the intent is to provide free college to lower and middle income students, which I think is a laudable goal, implement a simple means test of some kind. If the goal is to expand access to free college to city residents, why exclude private school graduates?
What else can be said except elections have consequences. Every time I turn around Jay Inslee can find another couple hundred million to throw to the activists in the homeless industrial complex (literally $800M in his last budget proposal). The state also has a budget surplus for next 3 years, yet somehow we don’t have money to invest in a vital service like our community colleges?
Same for the Seattle city council which is budgeting over $100M this year to keeping the failing homeless non profits and NGOs awash in cash for another year all the while dangerous encampments will continue to proliferate in the city. Yet no more money to support our community colleges through this challenging time.
The state is currently set to spend $61 billion dollars, and the city another $7 billion in 2022, but the priorities of our elected leaders are never focused on the simple nuts and bolts of good and effective governance. It would be so easy to find the money to keep these vital schools well funded (as well as not send SPS to the voters will another $1B levy) with all the cash the city and state are currently awash in, yet we won’t. Somehow the state and city are going to spend $71 billion dollars this year but leave public school and community colleges underfunded, that is just crazy. We’ll continue to throw billions of dollars at programs that don’t work but allow elected leaders to virtue single to their activist bases while continuing to fail at actually making progress on any of their pet causes.
It’s truly sad how stupid we have all become when no one wants to actually know how to read budgets anymore, and no one cares about budget accountability. We will just keep electing the same people over and over and keep spending billions on ineffective programs while underfunding basic services because we are all just more interested canceling others and shoving ideology down the throats of people that don’t agree with us.
Get woke, go broke. As they say. Also instead of focusing on school-jobs pipeline, they want junior party members.
BUT WHAT IS BEING DONE TO INCREASE ENROLLMENT? I never hear any plans like outreach or advertising in the high schools to help enrollment–just the woe-is-me attitude
The college has installed and implemented a CRM, moved to digital advertising, expanded into call in campaigns, retargeted students who haven’t completed their program, and dozens of other recruitment and advertising initiatives. Just because those plans aren’t publicized, doesn’t mean that the college doesn’t take the enrollment drop seriously.
Every college in the state is seeing comparable drops.