On this week’s episode, the Chronicle’s editor-in-chief and campus news editor discuss increased enrollment, cuts to student work hours, new building closure, pumpkin pop-up, and club involvement during the Halloween season.
Transcript:
0:05: Good morning and welcome to Chronicle Headlines.
0:07: I’m Will Blakley, the editor in chief of The Chronicle, and today we have a guest host with us if you’d like to introduce yourself.
0:13: Yeah, I’m Anna Bitz, and I’m the campus news editor of the Columbia Chronicle.
0:16: Yes, Anna, how are you doing this morning?
0:18: I’m doing good.
0:19: I’m happy to be here.
0:20: Yes.
0:20: Thank you for being here.
0:21: I appreciate it.
0:22: Mark sadly has other commitments and he hates me, so he can’t make it today.
0:28: So Anna will be filling in, and also she wrote and helped edit a lot of the stories we have today, so you’ll have a wonderful perspective, I think.
0:35: Yes. Yeah.
0:36: So we’ll hop right into it.
0:38: On October 7th, we had the State of the College, which is the big college meeting where everyone meets and talks about the state of the college. Anna, you were the lead writer on that.
0:48: Yes, I was.
0:50: Do you want to give a quick synopsis of just kind of what happened and what you saw?
0:53: Yeah, so the State of the College is where, you know, President Bolton and some other members of the administration, they come and they talk about, you know, finances, enrollment, retention.
1:04: And so, good news this year is that our enrollment is up and our retention rate has also gone up.
1:12: So, there’s a total of 4,265 students that are enrolled in this fall semester, which is about a 250, 300-ish, increase from last spring, so that is really good for the college
1:29: and the retention rate is also the highest it’s been since 2018, so that means students that come to college and they stay for a year.
1:37: Yeah, no, yeah, it’s up to 71.2%, which is above the national average of 69.1%, which is great for the college, although CEO and President of Columbia College, Shantay Bolton,
1:48: made it very clear that while this is all good news, that Columbia is not quite in the clear yet.
1:54: We still have a projected $18 million deficit.
1:58: One quote I think that really stood out to me that she said was, “We cannot cut our way to greatness,” which really just seems to illustrate the plan for the college going forward, which is
2:09: yes, supposedly more cuts, but also a lot of growth in terms of connecting students to the campus and to the college.
2:17: yeah, did you have anything on that, Anna?
2:18: Yeah, just another note that things I’ve been kind of hearing is just because the enrollment is up and the retention rate is up, tuition revenue alone cannot, you know, bring that budget deficit down, so
2:34: The college is still working at other ways to try and get back to like a stabilized budget, but this, the enrollment and the retention rate, that definitely helps so.
2:43: Yeah, on the note of the college budget, we are also seeing a further cut of student worker hours in certain departments.
2:51: We don’t have the specific names of those departments, or the specific numbers, but numbers I can give you are just the overall cut to the student Federal Work-Study allocation
3:01: which dropped from $780,000 last academic year to $570,359 this year, which is a $210,000 cut. So you know, obviously the college is making big changes in how we approach student workers.
3:23: We had the work cap at 15 hours, which certain students, if they have certain financial needs, are able to
3:30: bypass, but that is the general cut for most, if not all students. Along with that, the proportion of Columbia students working on campus has fallen from 12.3% in 2019-2020 to just 9.5% this year, which are numbers provided by Anna Ogier-Bloomer. Yeah, I don’t know.
3:48: I mean, these are changes that have to be made and obviously are cutting the deficit down.
3:54: Although some students have reported some additional financial stress because of it, just due to financial needs and the hope of having more hours to support themselves through college. Some students noted that this is how they pay their tuition, so it’s been a
4:10: tough rap for some students.
4:12: Anna, did you have anything to say on that?
4:14: No, I mean I do think it’s an unfortunate circumstance for some of these students who are getting their hours cut, but I also understand that,
4:23: you know, there has to be a little bit taken from everywhere to bring this deficit down.
4:27: Yeah, and then we also have news about the building hours here on campus.
4:33: 33 East Ida B. Wells will no longer be open on Saturday starting October 10th,
4:38: so that’ll be the previous Saturday to when this podcast is posted.
4:42: This is again just cost saving measures. You know, they are looking at how many people are using that student space and deciding which building hours are cut and for 33 Ida B. Wells that just happens to be the entire day.
4:58: You know, this is the building that houses the Chronicle, the School of Communications, and WCRX. Thank you.
5:07: I always mess that up.
5:09: I always flip the two, and Matt (Cunningham) always corrects me, and I never remember it.
5:13: Sorry Matt, I do love you.
5:16: But yeah, I mean most people have said that this isn’t going to impact them too badly.
5:21: I mean, I gave a statement for the story, and yeah, the Chronicle doesn’t really use the space on Saturdays.
5:26: I do think it’s unfortunate that our reporters who maybe live on campus or don’t live on campus who wanna be on campus to do work have to go to other buildings, but it’s not the biggest deal in the world.
5:37: I will say that
5:39: we have recently started housing the Center for Student Success, which some people were saying that they were trying to come to tutoring on Saturdays, which
5:47: you know, generally a free day for students. So this decision kind of came as a surprise to some of those students, although they said they could just come other days, which is true. But I do wonder what that will do for foot traffic here at the building.
6:01: Did you have any thoughts, Anna?
6:02: Yeah, I mean, I know we did have a reporter that came on, or a photographer, on Saturday to see if they could take a photo or talk to anybody, and there was nobody here. So
6:15: it kind of proves one of the points of why the building will no longer be open on Saturdays.
6:21: Yeah, exactly.
6:21: I mean, it’s a loss for, I think, a very specific set of students, but it’s not something that I think will greatly impact the college.
6:28: I mean, like they said in the State of the College, you know, they’re trying to look at cuts they can make that won’t overall impact student success.
6:36: I think this is one of those. You know, I’d rather
6:40: building hours get cut than anything else, more extreme measures, which the college has said they’re trying to avoid. So it shouldn’t impact too many people. WCRX did say they – did I write it wrong too?
6:56: I made sure to double check.
6:58: Wow, I’m awful.
7:00: I’m an awful journalist, guys.
7:01: No, I’m kidding.
7:02: This is why we have copy editors. But, they did say that they pre-record and schedule their content for the weekend, so
7:12: if you listen to WCRX, you’ll be fine.
7:17: They’ll still have their content on the weekends, so they’re not being impacted too badly.
7:23: In terms of fun news for the week, because that was all very serious, you know, that’s our job.
7:31: There was a pumpkin pop-up.
7:34: Yay! Yeah, so yesterday at the Student Center, the Student Programming Board, they hosted a pumpkin pop-up to get students welcomed into the fall season, and it turned out to be a pretty big event.
7:48: It was in collaboration with the DJ Club, Call of the Cauldron and the Bingo Club, and so it was a mix between
7:57: painting pumpkins and fall foods like caramel apples. There was live music, the Bingo Club did a little fall bingo card event, so I think students really enjoyed it. I think fun little events on campus like that can connect people from different clubs, bring them all into one space. So I think that’s really nice and
8:21: what better way than to start the fall season with a little event like that?
8:25: Absolutely. Yeah, October is a big month for Columbia.
8:29: We do so much for Wicked Week, which we’ll be reporting on, and just every club here I feel like has some sort of horror. (Jackie) Spinner has a love of horror.
8:37: We have our film clubs at the college that are a lot of horror movies, and if I’m not wrong, I believe Messed Up Movies Club is going to be doing, for Wicked Week, they’re doing a marathon of like five movies.
8:50: Which will be fun, I’m sure.
8:52: So yeah, I mean that stuff is starting to ramp up.
8:54: We’ll have our Blood Ball.
8:57: Usually, sometimes it’s in October.
8:58: Other times they push it back.
8:59: I’m not sure what the state of that is this year yet, but the Blood Ball is always very fun.
9:03: I went last year with some of our Chronicle reporters, and our photojournalist covering it took a photo of us.
9:08: It was a great time.
9:10: So yeah, I’m really excited to see what Columbia has in store for the rest of Wicked Week.
9:14: They’ll be doing Dark Market again too, which is the big art pop-up thing where students sell their work.
9:21: What’s that space called?
9:22: Shop Columbia. Yeah, Shop Columbia.
9:25: And you know, they get to make money from it.
9:27: It’s always a lot of really cool art.
9:29: I helped write the piece with our old editor Emma Jolly last year.
9:33: Rest in peace.
9:34: No, she’s doing fine, she’s doing good.
9:36: And it was really, really interesting talking about students’ inspirations.
9:39: It’s like the most passionate I’ve seen these art students about stuff because they get to do like gory, scary, or fun, cute
9:48: little art of Frankenstein and stuff and get to sell it and they always seem to be really passionate about the Halloween season, so I’m excited to see what else Columbia has in store this year.
9:56: Yeah, another thing that we will be reporting on soon is there are three classes, I believe, CCCX classes that are creating something or have a role in the Arts in the Dark parade.
10:10: So we will have more coverage of that soon to see what these classes are creating for that.
10:15: Yeah, I covered the Arts in the Dark parade last year and
10:18: this seems to be the biggest push we’re doing this year, because last year we just kind of had this history class make these
10:25: paper mache masks and stuff that they walked down the street with, and we had some of the clubs performing, but they’re really pushing it this year.
10:31: I’m really excited to see what they do, because reporting on that last year was a lot of fun because that was already so big.
10:37: So the fact we’re going bigger is insane, but I’m very excited.
10:40: We’re also bringing Rocky Horror to the theatre school this year, and I’m very excited for that.
10:44: I have a buddy who’s directing that, and they seem very excited about it, so it’ll be great.
10:51: yeah, I think that is all for Chronicle Headlines today.
10:54: Thank you all for tuning in.
10:56: I’ve been Will Blakley, editor in chief of the Columbia Chronicle, and I’m Anna Bitz, the campus news editor of the Columbia Chronicle.
11:02: Have a great day. Thank you.
Copy edited by Isaac Russo
