Posted by
Steve on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 2:22:30 AM
On Monday, we had our first meeting of the semester. At the meeting, our college president discussed some of the implications of the elections. The biggest was prop. 300. Prop. 300 denies benefits to anyone that cannot document that they are here in Arizona legally. The benefits that impact the college are that we have to charge out of state tuition to any person who is in the United States illegally.
Since my college is located in a part of town that is largely black and hispanic, our enrollment is largely black and hispanic. Many of the hispanic students have been undocumented aliens. Many of these undocumented aliens are children of people who came here illegally. They have lived their entire known life in the US. They went through school in Arizona. In the past, we treated these students the same as any other Arizona resident. With prop. 300, these students now become out of state students.
Our college president made a political statement during the meeting. He said that he did not agree with prop. 30. He felt that things were fine as they had been. In my opinion, he was talking about enrollment issues. With prop. 300, our enrollment has dropped. If our enrollment continues this drop, we will have to sustain budget cuts. My college is rather small. Our FTSE is 1807. That means we have the equivalent of 1807 full time students on campus. Since most of our students are part-time, our actual enrollment is above the FTSE level.
The actual drop this semester is only about 50 FTSE. That translates to a lot of students when you figure the part-time enrollment situation of most of our students. If we cannot bring our enrollment up, we stand to lose about $800,000 out of a budget of about $26 million. That is a pretty significant amount. Since I am trying to get hired on full time, a budget cut is not good. I need a budget increase to have any chance at getting hired on at the college. I hope we can figure something out and quickly.