Contact hours and credit hours are down for the Lone Star College System following Hurricane Harvey, leading to a drop in revenue for the system. However, overall growth has still exceeded projections made in 2014 when officials called for a $485 million bond referendum to build new facilities.

From spring 2017 to spring 2018, contact hours—the number of hours students spend in the classroom for each course—decreased by 2.5 percent, according to LSCS enrollment reports.

Most of the decreases can be attributed to LSC-Kingwood, which sustained more damage than any other of LSCS’s five main campuses during Harvey, officials said. The LSC-CyFair campus saw a 2.5 percent decrease in credit hours—three of which are given for an average course—between spring 2017 and spring 2018. LSC-University Park saw an increase in credit hours of about 3.7 percent over that time.

Because of the decrease in credit hours, LSCS’s revenue from tuition and fees—which provides about
33 percent of its total revenue—is down $3 million from 2017 to 2018, LSCS Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Mott said. However, she said, because the state funds LSCS in two-year cycles, the decrease in contact hours will not affect state funding. LSCS Chancellor Stephen Head said state funding makes up about 22 percent of LSCS’s total revenue.

Over the past 15 years, the system has used population growth in the service area to project future enrollment growth, Head said. He said projections made prior to the 2014 bond were conservative, and the system was easily keeping pace before Harvey.

“Our baseline number is 3 percent growth every year,” Head said. “We rely heavily on data and
metrics, so we know for the entire population, about 4 percent goes to school here.”

At LSC-CyFair, enrollment increased from 20,384 students in fall 2014 to 21,636 students in fall 2017.

Head said the system had to adjust its budget to account for the decrease in credit hours but did not have to initiate any major cuts.

“We were flat in enrollment and went down in contact hours, which is how we are funded,” Head said. “We put our budget together based on growth, but we were flat so we have to reduce our budget, which is easy for us to do because we are so large.”

Head said the system should be stable after budget changes are made he and expects the system’s funds to balance and meet expectations from the 2014 bond.

“We actually grew in the fall after [Hurricane Harvey], but this spring we actually flattened out, so we’re still ahead of what we projected,” he said.

Additional reporting by Chevall Pryce