Sage touts its turnaround
Troy The pandemic has been hammering colleges and universities in the Capital Region. Since March, high education institutions have spent millions of dollars to make their campuses safe from COVID -19 and minimize the spread of the virus.
The costs of refunding room-and-board for the spring semester that was cut short, stocking up on protective equipment, and setting up surveillance testing added up, and many schools were forced to furlough employees and eliminate programs to balance their budgets.
One institution that appears to be weathering the storm better than most is Russell Sage College, which just a few years ago was financially challenged. It has campuses in Troy and Albany.
Russell Sage President Christopher Ames, who joined the college in 2017, credits its
multiyear financial turnaround which began yielding results shortly before the pandemic began.
“The deficit sort of emerged between the time I was hired and when I started, so I walked into a situation where that, of course, was the No. 1 priority — to maintain the fiscal health. And it took a couple of years to get the ship completely righted,” Ames said.
Through a series of targeted cuts and a strategy to boost enrollment and rebrand the 105-year-old institution, the college whittled down a $4.8 million deficit and reversed one of the worst credit ratings of any U.S. college.
Between fall 2017 and fall 2019, the college eliminated 41 staff and administrative positions and reduced
its faculty by 10. All of the reductions were made through attrition — faculty members who retired or resigned and were not replaced. The college also scaled back some of its academic majors in areas like mathematics, chemistry and computer science.
“Once we got a healthy baseline and we weren’t bleeding money, we could start growing our programs and it’s been a really steady progress,” Ames said.
By spring 2019, Moody’s Investors Service had upgraded the college’s outlook from “negative” to “stable.” In June, the college had a positive balance of $2.9 million, marking the second consecutive fiscal year the college ended with a multimillion dollar surplus.
Like other colleges, Russell Sage refunded half of the room and board fees paid by residential students who were sent home
during the spring semester shortened by the pandemic.
But the college announced no layoffs or furloughs in connection with the pandemic even when its campuses were closed last spring and most of its operational staff were not needed.
“We had made the cuts earlier to reduce in size, so we were working with a lean workforce ... we’ve asked a lot of our employees to work with a smaller staff so we wanted to be loyal to them during this difficult time,” Ames said.
The school, which enrolls about 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students, saw relatively few coronavirus cases among its 500 residential students during the socially distanced fall term and saw its retention rates rise. Roughly 20 on-site students and employees have tested positive for the virus
since last fall, according to the state’s COVID -19 Report Card for schools.
Ames credits the seriousness of Sage students; many study and work in health care fields and are accustomed to practices like mask-wearing and handwashing.
During the height of the pandemic, many Russell Sage graduate students already working in health care professions and education administration were in the front lines battling the impact of the coronavirus in New York’s worst COVID -19 hot spots.
Since many health care professions require handson training, the college “had to be creative with modest resources,” according to Ames.
“We kept up the clinicals as much as we could, but as hospitals became overloaded, of course, the clinicals were shut down,” he said. “With our graduate programs, some of those programs had to be postponed and picked up in the summer. Now all of our students are caught up.”
The college leveraged its small size, ensuring that every residential student had a single room, which simplified the quarantine process, Ames said. Since most of its students are from New York, the college also had fewer challenges associated with out-ofstate travel.
As part of its restructuring, the college streamlined its two campuses, with the historic women-only Troy institution, the newer Albany location and its graduate school becoming one co-ed institution. Formerly known as the Sage Colleges, the institution went back to its original name Russell Sage College.