stray rain

The numbers look good. Evergreen just closed Spring 2025 with 13% year-over-year enrollment growth. Four consecutive years of growth. Fall 2024 exceeded 2,500 undergrads — an 8% increase. First-year retention hit 85%, a 12-year high. By every metric the college publishes, the recovery is real.

And yet: the pool is closing. The bookstore is being gutted. The administration is projecting another year of deficits. This isn’t a paradox — it’s evidence that nobody is asking the right question about how state higher education funding actually works.

Washington funds its public colleges on a per-FTE basis. The state allocates a fixed amount per full-time equivalent student, and institutions are supposed to generate matching revenue locally. But Evergreen, as a state college, has far more restricted ability to raise local revenue than a university or community college. It can’t charge differential tuition. It can’t access county property tax support. It has limited capacity for the non-credit workforce programs that community colleges use to generate supplemental revenue.

Translation: enrollment growth costs the college money that the state doesn’t cover.

The 2023 accreditation midpoint review saw this coming. Evaluators noted that the college’s “enrollment planning” was improving but its “financial health” was fragile. The college had reduced a $7.3 million deficit (2021) to about $1.2 million by 2024 through enrollment gains and budget cuts. The accreditation message was implicit: you’re on thin ice.

Then the ice cracked. Evergreen’s PaCE initiative (Professional and Community Education) grew from 105 FTE in 2022–23 to 229 FTE in 2023–24. In 2025, the college moved PaCE operating costs onto the regular operating budget. That triggered a projected $3.6 million deficit — right as enrollment hit its highest point in years.

More students. Higher retention. Bigger deficit. The funding model treats enrollment growth as a cost center, not a revenue center.

SB 5424, the bill that would have abolished Evergreen and converted the campus to a UW health sciences facility, was explicitly premised on the idea that the college was in decline. The sponsor cited 2024 enrollment as identical to 1982 levels. The bill died before committee because the enrollment data contradicted the premise. But the structural problem the bill was wrong about the diagnosis for is real: Evergreen is growing and the state is funding it like it’s shrinking.

The visible cuts — $60,000 in pool repairs ($24 per enrolled student), the bookstore restructuring, the loss of on-site textbook sales — are all rational responses to this mismatch. But they’re signs of triage. The college is cutting services to keep instruction afloat while instruction enrollment is growing.

And this connects to everything else happening in Thurston County. Evergreen is the county’s largest employer. When the college cuts, it ripples through the local economy. When Olympia simultaneously loses federal advocacy capacity and faces $11.9 million in infrastructure risk, and the county is running an $11.5 million deficit of its own — these aren’t parallel problems. They’re the same structural failure: three layers of government claiming to support regional education and economic development while their funding mechanisms are misaligned at every level.

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What you can do

This week: Request Evergreen’s full budget documents for FY 2024, FY 2025, and projected FY 2026–27. Specifically request: (1) the detailed fund split between general fund and restricted funds, (2) the baseline operating budget vs. deficit projections, (3) the state funding allocation formula as applied to Evergreen. Contact the Office of Financial Management or submit through the college’s public records process.

This month: Attend the next Board of Trustees meeting. Public comment is allowed. Ask directly: What is the state funding formula, and how does it account for enrollment growth? Why are enrollment gains not translating to operational budget growth?

Ongoing: Contact your state legislators (leg.wa.gov) and ask about higher education funding equity. Evergreen is growing faster than the UW system by some metrics but receives a fraction of per-capita state funding. Ask: Is the state prepared to align funding with enrollment growth, or will Evergreen continue deficit budgeting indefinitely?

Track the accreditation. The NWCCU cycle concludes in 2026. The 2023 midpoint flagged financial health. The full evaluation will be public. If the accreditors see growing enrollment with declining financial stability, that’s a finding. And accreditation is what makes your degree worth something.

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