Central Alberta colleges will get about $1.8 million back from the province, almost eight months after the Alberta budget cut operational grant funding across the province by 7.2 per cent.
Red Deer College will get $1,152,000 back and Olds College will get $689,300 back. Thomas Lukaszuk, deputy premier and minister of Alberta Enterprise and Advanced Education, announced the return of $50 million to the province’s post-secondary schools on Wednesday.
The deputy premier said on Wednesday that the money is meant to help ease enrolment pressures.
Funding was cut in March as part of the provincial budget.
Red Deer College president and CEO Joel Ward was in Toronto at a skills and post-secondary education conference with four other Alberta college presidents when they received an email about the announcement. The five went into a room and listened to the announcement on a cellphone.
“We were pleasantly surprised, we had no idea it was coming.
“Though our deputy premier did say if the government’s financial situation did change they would try to put some of that money back,” said Ward, adding he and the presidents of SAIT, Mount Royal University, Keyano College and Athabasca University listened to the call together.
The money coming into RDC will go towards helping with enrolment increases in the college’s international business certificate program, some engineer programs and massage therapy.
“It’s a funding envelope for enrolment,” said Ward.
“This is to address the shortage of spaces that had to be cut from the system when the big decrease came out.
“This is a little bit back so we can start to grow our enrolments again by putting this money directly into new programming.”
Olds College vice-president of advancement Jordan Cleland said the money will be put to good use right away.
Four programs at Olds will benefit from the sudden, mid-term influx of money, including the fashion program in Calgary, the tourism and hospitality program, the academic programming at the college’s water treatment wetlands and for new sports management programming and the college’s new centre for high performance sport.
“It’s not just ‘Here’s $700,000 for any part of your operation,’ it needs to be tied to student access and it didn’t take us long at all to be able to figure out exactly how we would use that,” said Cleland.
“We had to really take a hard, rationalizing look when we saw what the budget was in spring and this is at least a partial reprieve from those austerity measures.”
The $50 million the province is giving back represents about one-third of the $147 million that was cut in the March budget.
mcrawford@www.reddeeradvocate.com