Cuts make it difficult to stay out of the red

Heritage College works hard to balance the books 

 

Laurent Robillard-Cardinal

Balancing the books for Outaouais’ English-language Cégep will prove difficult this year, but Heritage College’s administration aims to table a balanced budget at their upcoming February board of directors meeting. “Following cuts of $19 million imposed to the réseau des cégeps last November, in addition to cuts of $22 million earlier last year, we are revising our budget for 2014-2015,” said Lise Desjardins, communications manager at Heritage College. “The last cut in November is the sixth one in four years for the réseau des cégeps, totalling $109 million.”

 

The General and Vocational Colleges Act forbids cégeps to present a budget deficit, but cuts are making it difficult for educational institutions to stay in the black. More than one quarter are in the red for the upcoming fiscal year which runs from July 1 to June 30 for Cégeps.

 

The the Fédération des cégeps severely criticized the government cuts. “We are asked to train the citizens of tomorrow by offering quality programs. However, the General and Vocational Colleges Act requires us to balance our budget. Boards of directors have done their homework five times rather than one, over the past four years. 

 

They participated in the collective effort to redress public finances. Since the beginning of the fiscal year, we were imposed cuts totaling 40.9 million. As the Director General of the Federation of Cégeps, Jean Beauchesne, said, enough is enough! From now on, it is the quality of services offered to students that will suffer, which we cannot accept as responsible directors,” said Jean Poitras, Fédération des cégeps board member.

 

The situation is getting more complicated for Heritage College, which has been able, for now, to avoid cutting services to students. “As Heritage College sees its number of admissions increase year after year, and because we were more conservative in our financial planning, we were able to maintain balanced budget to date and absorb cuts without them having an impact on student services. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain these services to students in the context of repeated budget cuts,” said Desjardins.