Venting, venting, venting...

Got nothing to write today. Had a good ride this morning, but got out of bed late and was running behind on the clock, so there was no lollygagging this morning.

Looking at my WNCC classes for Northern Nevada Correctional Center and Warm Springs Correctional Center. Unless something really strange happens, all three for these classes will fly:

NNCC COT 202: 14 students
NNCC IS 101: 15 students
WSCC IS 101: 14 students

This is all a matter of public record so I've no problem putting this out here. Western Nevada Community College pays part-time instructors $650 per credit. My paycheck for the above three classes, three credits each, will be $5850.

Now let's do the math.

Colleges and universities in the Nevada System of Higher Education receive a vast amount of their funding from the Nevada Legislature, which in turn funds the NSHE from taxes derived from tourism and gaming activities. The amount of money the individual NSHE institutions receive is based on the number of credits students take each Fall semester (the other semesters count, too, but to a less degree). The number of actual students in a classroom is also important but not so much as the number of credits.

Folks like me in a former life would add up the number of credits and divide them by 15, which produces a measurable unit known as an FTE. This is supposed to represent a full-time student, and the more FTE an educational institution reports, the more money it gets from the Legislature.

(Gad, this is boring, but it used to matter big-time to me. Almost done.)

At the moment, I'm teaching a total of 43 students, each of them taking a three-credit class. This equals 129 credits or 8.6 FTE. Back in the old days, an educational FTE was worth between $5000-$6000 from the legislature, so let's use the low end.

8.6 FTE x $5000 = $43,000 - $5850 = $37,150 net for the college from the Legislature.

There's a bunch of overhead costs involved, such as facilities, classroom supplies and furniture, heating, lighting, and administrative support. As I teach in a prison classroom, much of this overhead is absorbed by the prison. The college has to supply the classroom computers and a warm body, and provide each with administrative support.

Now the fun part and, again, this is all public record. Back in the day when I counted these things up, the WNCC Prison Education Program used to enroll about 200 FTE a year at WNCC which is, taking the low end again (200 FTE x $5000), about a million bucks from the legislature, a significant income for a college with a $16-18 million annual operating budget. The Prison Education program is the fourth largest money-maker for the college, behind the campuses in Carson, Fallon, and Douglas County. Do you think the Prison Ed program actually gets a million-dollar budget?

I've been wanting to vent that for a while.