Budget wrangling pays off for Cambrian

After a rocky few years which included the suspension of several of its programs and a $10-million reduction in government grants, Cambrian College is projecting it will balance its budget for the 2013-2014 school year.

This is the first time in several years the college will enter a school year with a balanced budget projection, said Cambrian's president, Sylvia Barnard, speaking to Northern Life April 25, after the college's board of governors approved the budget.

At this point in the year, the college is usually forecasting a $250,000 or $500,000 deficit, she said, although staff find efficiencies throughout the school year so the budget does balance in the end.

“So over the last four years, each year has been balanced by the end of the year,” Barnard said.

“But at the beginning of the year, we always knew there was a little bit of a deficit. Half a million on a $70-million budget isn't that significant, but you don't want it sitting there.”

Barnard said the $10-million drop in government grants over the past four years has been “hard to absorb.”

The college has been forced to make some changes to the way it does business, including suspending programs last year that weren't in demand, and adding others where there was a need, she said.

“It's a balancing act, it really is,” Barnard said.

“So if you look at the overall number of programs, we haven't significantly reduced the number of programs we offer. It's just we've changed which ones we've offered.”

Barnard, who is retiring in June, said it was her goal to make sure the college was on a good financial footing before she left her post.

“One of the things I wanted to be sure I would do is leave the college in the position where it was sustainable, and where it was successful.”

Unfortunately, though, she figures the college's decision to suspend some programs led to a dip in student satisfaction rates last year.

In last year's Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey, 69.6 per cent of Cambrian students said they were very satisfied with the college, which was a three-per-cent drop from the year before.

“Some of that, of course, was when things are out in the media about the fact that Cambrian is making changes, the students get sensitized to that,” Barnard said. “They weren't happy with us, necessarily.”

After receiving the bad news about its student satisfaction rates in 2012, Cambrian sat down with its students in focus groups, and asked how it could serve them better.

Students said they thought Cambrian could do a better job with IT in classrooms, common student areas needed to be updated, better selection was needed in the cafeteria and books cost too much.

This led Cambrian to make a number of changes, including updates to IT and common student areas, the introduction of more healthy and international foods in the cafeteria and book rentals in the bookstore.

The changes appear to have paid off.

According to this year's key performance indicator survey, students who are very satisfied has increased to 75.2 per cent, a marked increase from last year.

Cambrian is now close to the provincial average in this category, which sits at 77.1 per cent.

Barnard said Cambrian also ranks among the highest in the province in the other five categories, which include graduate employment rate, graduate satisfaction rate and employer satisfaction rate.

“I'm very excited,” she said.

“It's been two years of working and listening to our students and responding to their needs at a time when we were also trying to make sure that financially, we could afford to do the things we needed to do.

“So it's been a very challenging time, but all of our efforts are paying off.”