What should the school do with the huge reserve? by Jerome Jin

JEROME JIN said...
I have been thinking of the money issues at NWCS lately as well. Although I am no accountant, I am only capable of doing some rough arithmetic. I heard different figures regarding the current reserve at NWCS. It is between 300Kand 500K. This huge reserve is sitting in bank doing nothing else except gaining interests. This is against the purpose of charging tuition. We parents pay tuition to NWCS for it to use this resource for an education purpose, not investing. We parents can do much better than the school with the money in our hands for the latter.

What should the school do with the huge reserve?
Option One: Tuition Reduction
Let’s say the current reserve is 300K. Roughly again, the current enrollment is 1,000/year. An average tuition per student is $300/year (an average for Chinese and selective courses plus waivers and scholarships). Its revenue is 300K annually. Let’s say cutting the tuition across the board by 10% = 30K annually. The school will wipe out its current reserve or reduce it to a minimal amount in 10 years. To be conservative, the school can set the newly reduced tuition rate for a few years until it sees a need to readjust it later accordingly. To put bluntly, a minimal reserve attracts few greedy eyes to PREY on it. Even if the school is ended up in the hands of a bad school Admin team, it won’t have much to squander.

Options 2: Scholarship Program
Another way to tap into the current huge reserve for the good cause is to offer scholarships to the general public since ours is a non-profit institution, which is supposed to give back to the community and do public goods with its advantageous taxation status.
The following are a few suggestions for consideration:

1) Setting up a scholarship program exclusively for non-Chinese students, either adults or youth.
Initially, any non-Chinese applicants are eligible regardless their family financial status. Of course, the process should become competitive once there are more applicants than scholarship slots available. There are lots of benefits of doing so. For one, it will give the school a better exposure and a more positive image in the society at large. Another is to insert and mingle the Chinese culture into/with the western culture to promote diversity. To judge success for a Chinese school, nothing speaks better than having its student body with a wide racial background including white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, etc. Who knows? The scholarship program someday might snowball into something big and attract, as a result, many fee paying non-Chinese students to attend NWCS as well. (A side note: I heard in NPR recently that China is sponsoring a Washington State delegation to visit mainland while the state legislature is considering whether Chinese should be offered as a foreign language in the state’s public school system in the near future.)

2) Offering scholarship and assistant program to students from poor families in greater Seattle area.
There is certainly such a need out there. The school could not only waive the tuition for kids from poor families but also provide them with transportation, when their parents have difficulty, either by parent/volunteer or contract arrangement.

The cost of offering scholarship programs could be incidental and marginal since some classes don’t have a full enrollment. Filling up the available empty seats in the classrooms is just like” adding chopsticks without having to add courses at dinner”.

3) Sponsoring X student(s) from China each year to attend UW
Applicant(s) must come from poor family (set some standards such income level, poor regions, etc) or have disabilities that prevent him/her from being accepted by the schools in China despite of his/her academic abilities. The program can require the recipient(s) to teach at NWCS at weekends and in summers in the meantime. UW might even be willing to give a tuition waive so that NWCS would only have to provide costs for airfares, books, food and boarding (or hosted by members in rotation).

The above is what I can think of at the moment. I have tossed out my “stones” on the table for discussion. I again encourage other parents to search deep into their brains and bring out their “jades”.

June 14, 2007 4:41 AM