Georgia Perimeter College Cuts 282 Jobs

Georgia Perimeter College isn’t a name that most people outside of the area know. The school, which grants two-year or associates degrees to its students, in a variety of fields has been able to boast about being, “GPC takes in more undergraduate students each fall semester, accepts more transfer students and sends more students on to other institutions than any other USG institution, accounting for more than one-third of all transfer students.” The school is going to have to service those students and their ever-growing programs without a significant number of their staffers. The college has gotten rid of about nine percent of their workers earlier this week. On Monday the school gave workers their walking papers.

For those of you who are looking to put your hands onto some real numbers here the college employed about 3,100 people before the layoffs were begun. So the job cuts are set to impact 282 workers in total. That will be in the form of 215 full-time jobs lost and 67 part-time jobs lost. This will be more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” The terms of a mass layoff mean that workers are to be given some advance notice before they are taken off of the payroll, but in this case it was not stated when exactly the layoffs would go into effect.

For now the school has not made any announcements about the kind of positions that are being cut. We do know that professors with tenure and those on the tenure track have been exempted from this round of layoffs. So the bulk of the cuts have to come from non-tenured teachers, support staff and administrative staff. The school already expects that these cuts will lead to an increase in their overall class size. The school also expects to be offering less in the way of course sections for many of their courses, offering students less in the way of flexibility for class times.

The school is doing all of this to deal with a projected budget shortfall. The shortfall, which is projected to be about $25 million when all is said and done, is the result in a decrease in the amount of funding that the school is getting from the government and an increase in the amount of supplies. For the time being these are the only cuts in the works, and no programs are expected to be cut from the roster in order to make the budget work, but that may change when all is said and done.