Prairie State Students Deserve Better: Facing a Budget Crisis

By Troy Swanson, Legislative Chair

Prairie State College faces a budget crisis. Our members have paid for it with their jobs. We are disappointed and outraged that the State, County, and Board of Trustees are negligent in their work.

Over the past year, our support staff chapter at PSC has absorbed major reductions in force. The colleagues we lost were treated as if they were only line items in a budget. They were people who made the college operate. They caught the registration error before it cost a student a semester; they knew which financial aid file was needed and why; they kept the buildings open and the systems running so that faculty could teach and students could learn. Many gave years to Prairie State.

When PSC announced position eliminations in December, the college would not name a budget target and would not disclose the debt the cuts were meant to service. Every one of these cuts strips away services students depend on and dumps the work on staff already stretched thin. This month the Board of Trustees began drafting a financial exigency policy, the legal instrument that lets an institution conduct reductions in force and set aside contractual protections. This is alarming. 

Local 1600 is bringing this crisis to public attention because the people making these decisions have not. Our members deserve an accounting. Three levels of government share the blame.

The General Assembly owes PSC $8.5 million a year.

Springfield carries the largest share of the blame. Prairie State College received $3.3 million in total state operating grants last year. Under the state's own formula, fully funded, it was owed approximately $12 million. That gap is nearly $8.7 million a year.

Once again, the General Assembly failed to appropriate its fair share of support for Illinois’ community colleges. Due to this failure, the Illinois Community College Board cut its own per-credit-hour rates by 71.4 percent. Statewide, community colleges sit roughly 23 percent below their 2003 funding levels. 

For a district like Prairie State, the damage lands twice. PSC is eligible to receive equalization grants from the ICCB because its property wealth per student falls below the state threshold. Equalization exists precisely to offset a tax base too weak to carry a college, but it is paid from the same starved appropriation as everything else. In FY2026, the threshold was prorated down to 83.7 percent. The grant designed to protect the poorest districts is the one that gets cut when the state underfunds the system.

The Board of Trustees froze tuition for eight years with no plan.

Prairie State did not raise tuition from its 2018 rate until 2026.

Across those eight years, inflation surged, and operating costs climbed. Nearly every other community college in Illinois made modest, incremental tuition increases, precisely so they would never have to make a drastic one. PSC did nothing, and the gap compounded.

We do not want higher costs for students. But a tuition freeze is only responsible when it comes with a plan to replace the revenue. There was none. There were eight years of drift, and the bill has now arrived as layoffs and an exigency policy.

Cook County cannot deliver money it has already collected.

Property taxes are roughly half the PSC budget. For three straight years, Cook County has failed to get bills out on time. The second installment of 2024 ran four months late. The first installment of 2025 ran a month late. The second installment of 2025 is also late. 

Treasurer Maria Pappas has held her office since 1998. Collecting property taxes and distributing them to the bodies that depend on them is her core statutory duty, and she has built a considerable public profile analyzing this system's failures. Prairie State does not need more analysis. It needs the money, on time.

The burden is not shared evenly. A wealthy district can handle a two-month delay from its own reserves. Prairie State cannot do this and must borrow. Every dollar spent on that interest is a dollar not spent on students or the staff who serve them.

Prairie State Employees Are More Than a Turnaround Plan.

Our members at PSC are not line items in a turnaround plan. They register the students, maintain the buildings, and keep financial aid moving while three levels of government argue about whose failure this is.

To the General Assembly: You bear the greatest responsibility and hold the clearest fix. Fund equalization fully and end the proration. It is the clearest remedy, and it would deliver emergency support for Prairie State. Then take community college funding seriously and build an adequacy-based formula for community colleges instead of leaving our sector out of higher education reform entirely. 

Springfield's disinvestment is what turned an administrative delay and a governance failure into a crisis now cutting into the bone of this institution. Every other failure here was made worse by that one.

To Cook County and Treasurer Pappas: Three consecutive years of late bills is not bad luck. Get the money to the colleges on time. Make the bridge fund permanent. Then make it unnecessary.

To the PSC Board of Trustees: Release the numbers. Publish the exigency policy and take public comment before adopting it. And stop treating the state's abandonment as a fact of nature. Your students need you in Springfield making noise, not managing decline in silence.

The students of Prairie State College deserve better. So do the people who serve them.