Laurentian University plans to present a balanced budget for 2019-2020 in June, but has to eliminate $10.1 million from its spending to do that.
Interim LU president Pierre Zundel said the province's announcement that post-secondary schools would be required to reduce tuition by 10 per cent this fall creates about a $5.5 million hole in the budget.
The province is, however, creating a contingency fund for northern schools such as Laurentian – in part because they attract fewer international students whose fees are not subject to the tuition cut.
Zundel said he hopes the shortfall related to the tuition cut will be offset by this fund, but he hasn't received details yet.
Last year, Saudi Arabia also pulled its students from Canadian universities, including 130 from Laurentian, after a diplomatic dispute with Canada.
“So 130 of those students had their lives turned upside down and for us it created a $3 million hole in our budget,” Zundel said.
He said the university, which posted a planned $4.4 million deficit in 2018-2019, is also facing declining enrolment — he said there's just less people of the age that typically attends university.
“Starting in the fall of 2017, we lost 400 (students) relative to what we were expecting,” Zundel said. “We've been making up some of that ground, but we're still nowhere near the intended trajectory.”
Laurentian University also opted three years ago to completely exit Barrie, where it was offering some programs, by May of this year.
“So the 600 or 700 or students we had there are no longer in our ranks,” Zundel said.
“Most of the faculty that was there has been moved up to Sudbury. They are in our system. We're thrilled to have them up here, because they do a great job for us, but there is a pressure created by the fact that the students they used to teach in Barrie didn't come up with them. So that's a challenge.”
Zundel said the school is undertaking a number of measures to present a balanced budget in June.
“We've turned over every stone basically, that we can,” he said.
He said one of the big ones has been not replacing faculty and staff that have retired or taken jobs elsewhere.
“We're down about 16 total number of employees from last year's budget to this year's budget,” Zundel said, adding that one senior administrator job was also eliminated.
The university is also looking at things like looking at purchasing and contracting and limiting unnecessary travel, and a more aggressive international student recruitment, he said.
Sudbury.com was unable to contact the Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA) to speak about the budget process.
However, LUFA president Fabrice Colin told another local media outlet said he is concerned the changes could impact the quality of education at Laurentian.
Zundel said the university is being “very strategic and careful” when it comes to staffing.
In the fall of 2016, Laurentian was told by an accrediting body that its social work program was short seven professors and two support staff members, and it risked losing accreditation.
After hiring more people, Laurentian just received a four-year accreditation from the Canadian Association for Social Work Education.
“The programs that are most affected by staffing changes are the accredited programs,” said Zundel.
“Things like nursing or social work or speech pathology. In the last few years, we have made significant investments in new faculty positions for those accredited programs to protect our students' ability to graduate from those programs.
“There's no question you don't take the amount of money that we have to take out of our budget given all of these demographic factors and things that are affecting us without having an impact, but we are being very strategic and careful about what we're doing.”
