St. Clair loses $3.6M amid tuition refunds
St. Clair College lost about $3.6 million in annual tuition fees with 1,232 students opting to withdraw and take a full refund of their tuition following the five-week strike by Ontario’s community college faculty.
The deadline for withdrawals with a full refund was Tuesday.
“It’s averaged about 100 students a (school) day,” said Mike Silvaggi, college registrar and associate vice-president student services.
“It works out to an average of about $2,000 per student, $1,500 for tuition for the fall semester and $500 for ancillary fees.”
Silvaggi said the provincial government only mandated that colleges had to refund tuition, but left it up to individual colleges whether to return ancillary fees.
As it stands, Silvaggi said the college is now facing an approximate $3.6 million hole in its budget just for lost tuition refunds. There are also other costs pending, such as lost revenues and overtime to deliver the curriculum and for support staff as St. Clair extends its hours.
“We won’t have a real accurate picture until January,” Silvaggi said. “Many of the withdrawing students said they intend to start again in January, so we’ll see how many of them follow up.”
The college saved about $2.5-million in unpaid wages during the strike. It remains unclear if the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training will allow the college to count the lost tuition revenue as a strike-related expense to deduct from those savings.
“They’ve asked us to collect a lot of data on this, but they’ve given no clear indication of whether we’ll get reimbursed,” Silvaggi said.
“Administration is looking at a lot of different things now. Obviously, our financial position has changed from what we’d forecasted.
“This is going to be a lengthy exercise. It’s like doing two fiscal years.”
Silvaggi said originally administration expected to see about five per cent of students withdraw. The 12 per cent withdrawal rate is more than twice what St. Clair normally experiences in the fall semester.
“We’re still trying to make sense of that,” Silvaggi said. “At the end of the academic year, one thing we’ll see is the number of students not in good standing will be fewer.
“I think students are taking the opportunity to start fresh.”
If there’s any silver lining to the strike, it’s the delayed start to the second semester is allowing more international students to begin their studies at the end of January.
Silvaggi said it’s realistic that the college could see winter enrolment in January exceed the fall intake of about 1,000 international students at the Windsor and Chatham campuses.
“We’ll probably top our fall intake and we could have over 2,000 international students on our campuses,” Silvaggi said. “That will help mitigate the loss of tuition fees.”
While the tuition refund deadline has passed, students have until April 27 to apply to the Student Strike Relief Fund for extra expenses incurred related to the work stoppage.
“We’ve had about 200 applications come in,” Silvaggi said.
“I think we’ll see that number ramp up because most of the expenses many students will incur will be for the week before and after Christmas. They’ll get the receipts related to things like changed travel plans then.”
Many of the withdrawing students said they intend to start again in January, so we’ll see how many of them follow up.