Orchard Park, N.Y. (WBEN) - Due to a lack of enrollment, Erie Community College discontinued six of their programs back in March. The school is now facing a deficit of $9 million dollars and is now looking to cut off 90 jobs and counting as part of their first round plan.
"The financial concerns are going to be addressed through the retirement centers that are being offered to the AAECC, FFECC and there also is going to be additional layoffs for the those two unions. As was announced last month to our staff and faculty, it's going to be a staged approach. The challenge we have is the AAECC (Administrators Association) and the FFECC (Faculty Federation) are much more directly tied to the teaching of students and obviously, what we want to do is ensure that we're doing everything possible to enable everyone who wants to attend to participate and take the programs they want, as long as they're viable programs," said President of SUNY Erie Community College, Dr. David Balkin.
Positions cut are expected to reach 150 if a retirement incentive for eligible faculty and administrators that the county and ECC offered in April does not result in enough voluntary retirements.
The current enrollment rate has been steadily declining but that's not just an issue for SUNY schools.
"The enrollment challenge isn't unique to Western New York, or SUNY (State Universities of New York). For the most part, community colleges have have had declining enrollment for years and what happened is, over the COVID years, things have changed significantly and it's become apparent to many employers and also to potential students, that what employers are really interested in are competencies more than credentials. If someone has the expertise required, in order to help a company get a jump up on the competition, or to satisfy whatever demand they have in their business, they're more than interested in hiring somebody with that competency," said Dr. Balkin.
Dr. Balkin's is very happy to extend programs where students gain hands-on experience to help achieve their degrees. The downsizing of the campuses next year will be contingent on student enrollment, which Dr. Balkin expects to be more promising than last year.
"Whether South campus grows or shrinks or North campus grows or shrinks, it's going to be dependent on student enrollment and demand for programs. The facilities that are required, the ideal situation, from my perspective, moving forward, is to better leverage existing assets in the community, which means potentially partnering with private companies, who have the facilities that can be used to train, you might be aware that we've got a great collaboration with Northtown Auto and West Herr, in which we do a program where students take classes for seven and a half weeks at SUNY Erie and then for seven and a half weeks there at a dealership, gaining hands-on experience and they rotate," Dr. Balkin said.
The new Bills stadium, when under construction, will take space from ECC South's campus in order to complete construction, 55 acres of ECC's of 121 acres of ECC South. Dr. Balkin is not worried that this will have an impact on operations of the school when the construction commences.
"The only thing that it's going to affect is probably the location of a couple of sports fields. I mean that's the most tangible direct impact. 55 acres, basically being subsumed, to enable the construction of the new facility, that will require that we move a couple of soccer fields and our football field and we're in discussions with various parties on how best to accommodate that. So we don't see it as having any interruption on any of our activities," said Balkin.
