Classes at Paul Smith’s College begin today. The college is restructuring large portions of its staff and trying to find stable financial footing after an attempt to affiliate with the educational nonprofit Fedcap ended earlier this summer. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

PAUL SMITHS — Paul Smith’s College’s fall semester starts today. As classes gear up, the college is still developing its plan for moving forward without the Fedcap affiliation it was working on for more than a year, it is overhauling how it operates in an effort to slash expenses, and it is consolidating duties to deal with a significant reduction in staff.

The college is a major employer and economic driver in this area. There are many people currenty living in the Tri-Lakes region who moved to attend the college and decided to stay. Its students live in the community, its staff research the Adirondack climate and its alumni work at or own businesses all over the region. It’s been struggling financially amid at least a decade of enrollment decline.

The Fedcap affiliation was touted as a saving grace for the private college. For the past year, the college has sought to make the New York City-based educational nonprofit Fedcap Group its “parent company,” but requirements from state regulators caused the two to put an end to this attempt last month. The two had already been collaborating prior to getting approval from the state.

While some former employees of the college say Fedcap brought a “toxic” workplace environment, and that many people left because of this, PSC interim President Dan Kelting said Fedcap made valuable upgrades to the college in its time. The two are still partnering on some endeavors as separate entities.

Fall semester enrollment projections are slightly lower than they were last year, and the college is still trying to find stable economic footing. As staff have left their positions, they are often not being refilled. Instead, the college is restructuring and cutting these positions through attrition to save costs. The college has also made a few staff layoffs in the weeks leading up to the start of the semester and eliminated its provost position in the spring.

Still, the college is currently hiring for around 16 positions in admissions, advancement, athletics, finance, IT and student support. Some of these openings have come about due to Fedcap pulling out. The college had been outsourcing work in these departments to Fedcap as it tried to get the affiliation approved, leaving the college to now fill these gaps.

College administrators say they’re on the path to a sustainable future and that “the best is yet to come.” They refute speculation that the college will be closing anytime soon. They say the college is in a tough spot, but believe through the hard work of its staff they can keep it sustainable.

Kelting wants to maintain confidence in the institution, to keep attracting new students and keep the ones they have. He said confidence is key for enrollment.

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Enrollment

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As of Monday, 185 freshmen and transfer students are set to become Smitties this year. PSC Chief of Staff Nicole Feml said students are accepted up until the first day of classes, so students were still coming in and these numbers were not final yet. The college’s student census is taken on the second week of classes. Full enrollment for the coming semester is estimated at just over 600, Feml said.

Last fall, 196 freshmen and transfer students became Smitties and 668 total students were enrolled. That was down from 754 students the year before. The college reported 593 students at the start of the 2023 spring semester. PSC’s enrollment peaked in 2012 with 1,050 students and it’s been on the decline ever since.

Feml said the college exceeded its goals for deposits this semester. She said a change in enrollment trends will not be immediate.

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Staff consolidation

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There will be fewer staff on campus this semester. The college has been making cuts through attrition to run on a tighter budget, consolidating duties into new positions to save on costs, and restructuring how the admissions and academic affairs offices work.

“Whenever someone leaves it’s an opportunity,” Kelting said.

He said they never want people to leave, but when they do, it’s an opportunity to stop and ask if the college needs that role to fulfill its duties or if they can distribute them a new way. Rather than having a culture of “just refilling jobs,” Kelting said for most people who have left, they’ve redistributed duties to be better stewards of the college’s finances.

For example, Feml is the college’s first chief of staff, a position that was created as the result of a reorganization to make a “lean and mean administration.” Instead of having different vice presidents working in their individual department “silos,” she said she can work across all departments on one salary. Feml has been in this position for three months now.

Kelting said a common criticism of colleges is that they have too many high-level positions. Feml said her position allows for more communication and efficiency between the departments, and less bureaucracy.

A former employee of the college who spoke to the Enterprise on conditions of anonymity for fear of retribution provided a list of everyone they could think of who has left the college in the past year — 32 in all. At least six people left the admissions office. Five also left the academic affairs office. Four people left the student affairs office and four more in IT. Three people left human resources. Two left facilities. And the offices of advancement, marketing, administration, faculty, dining services, financial aid, registrar and athletics each lost one employee.

Feml and Kelting said these people left for a variety of reasons. Some left to grow in jobs elsewhere in their field. Others left because of Fedcap, but Feml said others joined PSC’s staff because of the attempted affiliation.

Feml said that currently, the college is down 26 employees. Some are in the works to be replaced as they add resources back into operations where Fedcap was assisting. The college has 165 staff, according to Feml, plus 102 seasonal staff with the college’s Adirondack Watershed Institute research organization.

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No provost

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The college doesn’t have a provost leading the academic affairs office anymore. Former Provost Nicholas Hunt-Bull is gone after the college eliminated his position in the spring.

Kelting is assuming the role of the provost at the head of the academic affairs office. Again, Feml said they are taking an intentional pause before hiring again. Other colleges have other academic affairs structures, she said, and PSC is looking at its options, including a potential restructuring of the academic affairs office.

“It’s been a while since we kind of, on an institutional level, did strategic thinking and planning for the future,” Kelting said.

Hunt-Bull signed a non-disparagement agreement when he left so he would not say much and declined to speak on many subjects.

Hunt-Bull had been the provost at the college since 2015. Last year, he was the college’s interim president through the summer and was appointed as a permanent president until November, when the college’s board returned him to the provost position and appointed Kelting as the new interim president.

Feml said she couldn’t comment on why Hunt-Bull is no longer working at the college.

Hunt-Bull’s father-in-law, Jay Hunt, alleged to the Enterprise that Hunt-Bull was terminated at the direction of Fedcap President and CEO Christine McMahon.

“In April 2023 … Kelting informed Nicholas that Christine McMahon had told him that she wanted ‘Nicholas gone by the end of May,'” Hunt wrote.

Fedcap and the college both vehemently deny this.

“It is absolutely not (true),” Fedcap spokesperson Josh Vlasto wrote in an email. “The president made the decision with the approval of the board.”

Feml said the provost position was eliminated as a result of restructuring the academic affairs office.

Hunt-Bull was living on campus when his position was eliminated. State law gives tenants 30 days to leave if evicted by a landlord and in the month he had, Hunt-Bull moved his family into an apartment in Plattsburgh. Freb Hunt-Bull, Jay’s daughter who is married to Nicholas, was also laid off by the college with no notice and no severance earlier this month, Jay told the Enterprise.

Kelting has taken on the provost role, splitting his time mentally and physically between the two big roles — three days a week in the president’s office, two in the provost’s office. He said he’s delegating a lot. Feml points out that this is not unheard of. Other colleges have seen their presidents take on provost or CFO roles at times, too.

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Post-Fedcap

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The college’s planned affiliation with Fedcap was being pitched as a saving grace for the college.

In July, the two announced they were discontinuing their efforts to partner after conversations with the New York state Department of Education showed the state accreditors were requiring amendments to the acquisition plan that Fedcap would not make.

Kelting said nearly every college should be looking at partnerships in today’s higher education climate. He felt the attempt to affiliate with Fedcap was the right idea at the time. However, Fedcap not being a higher education institution made it difficult to get approved by the colleges’ accreditors and regulators. This was the first time the state Educational Department had seen such a request, he said, and they were wary to set precedent.

While they had been trying to get this affiliation approved for well over a year, Fedcap was already helping out with numerous things on campus — it rebuilt the college’s IT infrastructure, improved Wi-Fi on campus and had a chief financial officer on loan, according to Kelting.

“For decades, Fedcap has been helping not-for-profits, job training organizations, and educational institutions expand their mission and serve more people,” Vlasto wrote. “Together with the PSC board of trustees, administration, and faculty and staff, we are proud of work we did to expand programs and assist with long-overdue structural change at the college. To this day we continue to provide IT and other support and will continue to help the college any way we can because of its importance to the Adirondack region and the entire state. We continue to care about the long-term well-being of the college.”

After the affiliation fell through, Fedcap has been helping transition responsibilities back to the college’s own employees.

“They didn’t abandon us,” Kelting said.

He said they are still collaborating on projects as two separate nonprofits. The college has a new culinary certification program set to launch in spring 2024 which would have students split their time between a New York City teaching kitchen before completing a “Summer in Saranac” residency around the Paul Smiths area.

The Paul Smith’s College Urban Forestry Initiative, a pilot program with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, launched last week. More than 100 entry-level parks employees applied, looking to get new training and further their careers, according to Feml. She said 18 were accepted for this initial run, and 32 more will be accepted in the next two years.

This is a partnership between PSC and the city of New York, but Kelting said Fedcap was a conduit to gave them a “foot in the door” with the parks department. Next month, PSC faculty will go downstate to do instruction on climbing and rigging trees. The class wraps up next year. Kelting said some of these students asked about getting virtual degrees at PSC, so he said the college might look to introduce a program like that.

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Toxic accusations

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Some former staff of the college say they’re not sad to see Fedcap go. They claim the educational nonprofit brought a “toxic” work environment to the school.

A former employee of Paul Smith’s College, who asked to not be identified publicly for fear of retribution, said when they started working at the college, it was a “fabulous” place to work.

“Everything went wrong last fall and it became a toxic and dysfunctional workplace,” they said.

They said Fedcap’s decisions at the college were leading to low morale.

“There was a strong sense that Fedcap wanted to get rid of people and were pushing people out of their jobs to avoid firing people by making things unpleasant for people, by doing soft-firing techniques like taking away people’s responsibilities or the best parts of their jobs,” they said.

“None of those people were pushed out. They left for other opportunities,” Kelting said.

Former employees refuted this.

“I definitely left because of Fedcap,” another former PSC employee in the advancement office who asked to not be publicly named for similar reasons as other employees wrote to the Enterprise. “Everyone tries to take another opportunity before they quit a job, but look at the jobs they took. They left PSC with pretty cushy benefits, retirement tuition benefit, a million days off, to go to jobs that have a lot less of these things. … You don’t get that kind of mass exodus just because people have ‘other opportunities.'”

They alleged that Fedcap CEO Christine McMahon “regularly berated” staff.

“She had these four day sessions where she would tell them how they were terrible at their jobs,” the former employee wrote in a message to the Enterprise. This hindered their work and made one staff member cry, they said.

“McMahon was likely to scream at people,” the other employee said.

Vlasto wrote in an email to the Enterprise, “While we appreciate the perspective of all former employees, baseless ad hominem claims from former employees stand in stark contrast to the good faith efforts and hard work of both organization’s leadership and staff, and the significant financial investment made by Fedcap into helping put the college on the road to a sustainable future.”

To Kelting, this was the result of trying to mesh two different cultures together. Paul Smith’s College has a rural pace with hardworking staff and a community where everybody cares about each other. Fedcap had an New York City urban mindset. This created “uncertainty,” he said. He did not address accusations of toxicity directly.

The Enterprise has attempted to speak with numerous other PSC staff, former and current, but many say they do not want to speak on the record, or even anonymously for fear of retribution. No one wanted to say anything on the record, even after they’d already left the college.

Kelting said his message to the campus has been “let’s turn our backs on the past.”

“We all want a thriving Paul Smith’s College,” he said. “We know we can do it. We have to just look to the future and stop thinking about the past.”

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Admissions

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The former advancement employee said staff were upset that while Fedcap was trying to increase enrollment, they would not hire people to replace people who had left admissions.

“We got to the point where there were literally no admissions staff,” they said.

There had been around five people in the office before then. This former employee said they were never given a reason for this and it was hard for them to trust Fedcap’s leadership. The former employee claims Fedcap administrators didn’t listen to college staff’s suggestions.

But Kelting said the old model wasn’t working. PSC is now rebuilding that office in a new way.

“We had a fully-staffed admissions department for decades. … By the numbers, that wasn’t working,” he said. “Since 2012 (enrollment has) been dropping. That was with a fully-staffed and ‘professional’ admissions department.”

Now, he said recruitment is the whole campus’ responsibility, not just the admissions department. And the college is tapping its alumni to be recruiters.

The college’s alumni weekend was last month and 300 of 15,000 total Smitties showed up from all over the country. Kelting said they represent a “huge untapped role” as “15,000 recruiters” for the college. PSC is asking its alumni to take on some of the admissions and outreach work, going to their local schools and admissions events to rep the college.

Kelting said they are relaunching the “Compass Club” — a former program that provided alumni with a box of materials for recruiting. The college didn’t give enough guidance before, he felt, so they want to do it right this time.

The admissions office is in charge of getting more students. More students means more money for the college. Its primary source of revenue is tuition and housing fees. Kelting said the enrollment season for 2024 started earlier this month.

The college has a benefit, he said, in that it can differentiate itself over other “generic” colleges because it is so unique. He said for 80% of incoming students this year, PSC was the only college they applied to.

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Staff layoffs

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The college made a handful of staff layoffs earlier this month. Feml said she cannot comment on specific personnel matters, but told the Enterprise the college eliminated one term employee due to low enrollment in their program and two positions due to restructuring and elimination of their functions.

She wouldn’t name which departments these positions were in. PSC has a small campus, she said, with only a few people in these departments. She said the college was waiting for them to share the news with their networks first, and to not “out” them.

The college bases how many adjuncts and term employees it needs for each academic semester on course enrollment, Feml said. Due to low course enrollment in the Business and Hospitality program, the college did not renew one term employee.

Feml said this term employee taught a variety of classes they didn’t need to offer, based on what students are enrolled in the coming semester, or could be covered by a full-time professor who had openings and needed full-time work. She also said this could be due to declining enrollment.

She said PSC plans to hire adjunct professors in the fall semester for its other programs with need. According to Feml, PSC had 26 adjunct professors in the 2022-23 academic year, and they are still finalizing the numbers for the coming year. She said some staff employees serve as adjuncts.

These layoffs were predicted in a letter Kelting sent to faculty earlier this year.

The college recently hired a chief financial officer through an interim placement agency named The Registry. Feml said this CFO has a one-year contract and is currently working with the CFO who was on loan from Fedcap in the transition. The new CFO will have a year to deliver certain requests to the college, including setting them up to conduct a search for a permanent CFO.

Feml said the college is seeking to fill a total of 16 positions right now. She said 11 are currently listed online, including three in the Adirondack Watershed Institute.

If all these positions are not filled by the start of classes, Feml promised there would be no postponements and no drop in services as a result. There may be a gap where people are filling in interim positions, though, she said.

Posting listings for these positions is proof the college is here to stay, Feml said.

“The best is yet to come,” she said.

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Future plans

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Feml said the college has “incredible employees” who are “fully committed” as they take on “more and more” responsibilities to ensure the future of Paul Smith’s.

Last week, Kelting shared the administration’s “roadmap to success” with campus staff. But Feml said this is not a public document. It will inform future documents that will be made public, she said.

The college’s board of trustees passed its budget last week. But its budget is not publicly available yet, and the college has declined to share it thus far. These budgets become public later in the year after an audit of the college’s finances.

Feml said they need to find other revenue so they’re not as dependent on enrollment. She said they are trying to use the campus to host conferences, events and weddings in the summer.

They are also looking to diversify their academic offerings. Kelting said fewer students are seeking traditional degrees and more are looking for specific trainings and certifications.

The college needs to meet people where they are and where they want to be, he said. This year, PSC will submit a number of certificate programs to the state to potentially approve for next year — including certification programs in arboriculture and land surveying. Future certificates could include baking and culinary, he said.

He described these as “stackable” skill programs, where students can take on a focused study to advance their career and can step off at any point if they don’t want a full degree.

The goal is to lean on the college’s experiential learning roots.

“We were experiential before it was cool,” Feml said.

The college started in 1946, before there was a word for the learning style.

The college is currently making regular payments on the loans it took out to finance the construction of the relatively new Upper St. Regis, Lower St. Regis and Overlook dorms.

This spring, the college froze its tuition rate for undergraduates at $32,048 in an effort to boost enrollment. This freeze will last through the 2024 spring semester and will be reevaluated by the board of trustees before the 2024 fall semester.

Everyone involved in the college — from administration, to Fedcap, and even former employees — said they want the best for Paul Smith’s and hope for a successful future.

The employee from advancement said they don’t want to rag on their former employer. They want to see it doing better, and only criticize decisions because they care.