Olds College president Stuart Cullum says the college was hit with a 2.2 per cent reduction in funding from the province and funding for maintenance and infrastructure has been frozen for a year as a result of the Oct. 24 provincial budget.
However, he's confident the college can weather that storm because officials anticipated a funding cut and prepared for it back in the spring.
"We anticipated that, based on what we were hearing from the government and what we knew about their mandate — that they were going to be fiscally prudent in this budget and that's exactly what we saw," he said during an interview with the Albertan.
Cullum said over the past couple of years, Olds College has reduced its senior administrative staff by seven positions.
"And we continue to do everything we can to create efficiencies in our organization and address our expenses without impacting learning, programming, as well as our applied research programming," he said.
In the case of maintenance, Cullum said the plan is just to postpone things like renovations for at least a year.
"We just need to prioritize accordingly and ensure that our critical needs are addressed first. There'll be some things that will have to wait," he said.
Cullum is confident that despite the cuts, Olds College will see its student population actually grow in the next few years. He said that's because the college is providing industry with what they want — programming relevant to their fields. As a result, grads get jobs.
"We saw a 15 per cent increase in enrolments last year. We're sitting at about 1,438 full-load equivalents, so that means if you take that 3,800 and you sort of combine them all into full-time students, we're sitting at 1,438," Cullum said.
"We have the highest enrolment ever at Olds College and we see that trend continuing up as a result of the relevance and strength of our programming."
Cullum cited the college's focus on smart agriculture technology as an example of teaching fitting hand-in-glove with industry needs.
"We're also developing new programming in agriculture technology. That's a response to what the industry needs, and those programs, as they fill, it'll just continue to increase our overall enrolment," he said.
