Bishop’s Cashes Massive Government Cheque

Ministry of Education releases several years’ worth of grants

Earlier this month, Bishop’s received a whopping $6.8 million from the provincial government – money that the government had withheld due to budgetary and labour concerns at the University.

The stunning amount is the sum of four years of conditional grants that the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport (MELS) began to withhold when the University ran a deficit in 2005. There was additional consternation at MELS because of the lack of a concrete recovery plan by the University, and the ongoing pension dispute.

In February, after the long-awaited resolution to said dispute, the University presented its bold, 10-year recovery plan to MELS, and it seems the administration was persuasive enough this time around.

As noted at a recent meeting of the Executive Committee of the Corporation, the released grant is significant to the school not only for the funds themselves, but also because it is a vote of confidence in the University’s recovery plan. The grant has been placed directly in the bank in order to free up some credit, but the plan de redressement aims to create a more long-term solution.

The 10-year plan projects that the University will begin registering surpluses in 2012, although doing so will only be the first step in erasing the accumulated debt Bishop’s will face by then. As Corporation President Robert “Squee” Gordon said at this month’s Corp meeting, “We’re not totally out of the woods; we’re back in the game.”

Bishop’s will need a student body of 2200 by 2013 to register a surplus and start to repay the projected $12-14 million deficit with which the school will be saddled.

The plan, described by interim VP Finance Hélène St-Amand as a “survival plan,” focuses largely on the two “R”s: recruitment and retention. The goal of 2200 students in 2012 is a drastic 26% jump from this year, and will require a steady increase of incoming students, as well as a high rate of retention among current students.

The bold plan recently gained the University some nationwide attention: a Sherbrooke Record story about the plan was linked to in the Academica Top Ten, which bills itself as a “daily digest of top news and opinion affecting post-secondary education in Canada.”

Even with such ambitious goals, the school seems on track to meet its objectives for the 2009-10 enrolment, which VP Academic Michael Childs says continues to track ahead of both last year’s numbers and an average of the past four years.

Principal Michael Goldbloom explained that attracting students, particularly out-of-province ones, is difficult in the current economic climate. “In the midst of a recession, families do not want to send their children away for school. A university education for many urban youth is attained through a ride on the subway, not a flight across the country.”

These measures have been met with optimism from members of the Bishop’s management and community, but the school’s financial troubles are far from solved.

“We need to stay on top of this, revisiting it to find potential increases in revenue wherever we can,” said St-Armand.