After a tumultuous few years for the CSCU system with a merger of 12 Connecticut community colleges, dropping enrollment numbers following COVID-19 and protests amid conflicting spending plans and tuition increases, Gov. Ned Lamont appointed a new chair for the Board of Regents — CSCU’s governing body — last week: Martin Guay.
Guay, who was appointed to the board in September 2023, will succeed the board’s current chair, JoAnn Ryan, whose term expires at the end of the month.
“I’ve seen [the system] on the inside for the last year, and what I saw was a group of really committed people,” Guay told the CT Mirror this week. “You don’t always see that from the outside, but people are very committed in the system, [which has] been through a lot of change … Part of what we need to do is to continue to build the culture and move forward [and] execute on all the commitments and changes that have been made.”
Before joining the board, Guay interacted regularly with the state’s higher education system. Through his career in workforce development at Stanley Black & Decker, he began to work with the Business Higher Education Forum in 2018. The output of his work is the Tech Talent Accelerator, a program to align business with higher education. He included the CSCUs in the program in 2019.
He also helped to facilitate the start of the Office of Workforce Strategy and became a member of the workforce council. The council has worked to get the state’s employment numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels; 1.87 million people were employed in 2019, about 50,000 more than are employed today.
“The state will be optimized when CSCU is optimized,” Guay said. “When CSCU is performing at a high level, the state will actually perform at a high level, because people will go into [higher education] and get really good paying jobs and go into the economy. Workforce development is the biggest engine for economic and community development.”
As he takes on his new role connecting the state’s workforce and its students, Guay is focused on communication and transparency.
Guay said that despite some pushback against the merger of the state’s community colleges, he’s a fan of the consolidation.
“I’m a big believer in collaboration, and I think we had some redundancies before. We also had some competition.”
Guay said he hopes to enable statewide growth and streamline communication and budgeting. This year, the board’s management of the university system’s budget came under fire after it voted to raise tuition for the 2024-25 school year by 5%.
The tuition hike came amid the board’s scramble to manage more students on less money, as pandemic relief funds and additional state funding expired, causing a $140 million shortfall. The increase, coupled with faculty buyouts and layoffs, led some faculty senates to cast a vote of no confidence in the Board of Regents.
“This year, there have been 43 presidents [with] votes of no confidence,” Guay said. “We don’t have a monopoly on these challenges, these problems or these opportunities.”
Guay said he hopes to reestablish confidence in the board. He plans to meet with faculty and students, getting them “more engaged in the discussion.”
“We all have a stake in this moment, and I think we have to get to know each other to figure out how to work well together. We’re all on the same lifeboat here.”
Enrollment numbers across the CSCU system have dropped significantly. Between 2010 and 2020, there was a 33% decline.
Coupled with the new tuition increases, things could get worse. Guay, however, remains optimistic and unconcerned, citing a decline in college-age students as the reason for the state’s decline in enrollment numbers.
“What you’re seeing is a demographic trend where enrollment is going down after the financial crisis of 2007 [and] 2008. There [were] less births in the country in those two years, and we’re coming up to where all those kids would have been 18.”
The national college-age population declined by 7% between 2010 and 2020, but that population in Connecticut increased by 2.3%.
Things are looking slightly up for this next school year. The system’s four-year universities each saw an increase in applications, according to Samantha Norton, CSCU’s director of communications.
At Southern Connecticut State University, undergraduate applications increased 16% from 2023. At Central, they increased 7.2%, at Western they increased 8.2%, and at Eastern they increased by 20%.
To meet the demands of the student population, the Board is attempting to introduce new course programming and offerings following personnel cuts, including programs in artificial intelligence, social work, sports management and homeland security.
Guay is also hoping to restore the board’s relationship with the faculty unions, who have expressed outrage with how state funds for the system are managed, by ensuring more transparency between administrators, faculty and the board.
“I don’t like when people are protesting,” he said. “I’d rather come in and sit down and have a coffee and understand what people are trying to do and agree on what we can agree on, and disagree on some other things, and figure out a way to move forward. We’re kind of all in this together.”