As a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons back in the 1970’s, I used to love singing along to episodes of Schoolhouse Rock, and one of my favorites was “I’m Just a Bill,” a bouncy, bluesy three-minute explanation of how ideas become laws in America.
Those catchy little ditties were a combination of grooviness and wonkiness, and somehow made learning about civics, mathematics, language, and physics seem both simple and cool.
Well, it’s late May in Massachusetts, the time of year when colleges like NECC are in the home stretch of advocating for the funding and legislation they want in next year’s state budget, a process which can seem bewilderingly byzantine to the casual observer.
So, with apologies to the brilliant creators of this savvy seminal series from my youth, here is my, admittedly more detailed, Schoolhouse Rock-like explanation of the annual budget process for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (2025 edition):
“It’s the Budget” (Sung to the tune of “I’m Just a Bill”)
It’s the budget
Yes, the state’s big budget
And it’s how we know how much we will get
Well, it’s a long, long journey
From the fall to the spring
While we lobby and debate
So it will have everything
That we need for our students all year
At least we hope and pray that they met
Our requests in the state’s big budget
Here in Massachusetts, community colleges like NECC rely on the state for a portion of our annual budget, as well as funding for special initiatives, and of course for laws that impact how we operate and sometimes how important changes are made.
The state’s “fiscal year” (the 365 days in which it spends its money) runs from July 1 – June 30, so June is usually a pretty important month, as the legislature and governor work out whatever differences they may have and (hopefully) finalize a new budget in time for the next fiscal year to begin.
While June may be a critical time of year for this process, in one way or another, it’s almost always “budget season” in Massachusetts, and it usually looks something like this:
September – December
Well, it’s a long, long journey
From the fall to the spring
Hundreds of state agencies, from the Architectural Access Board to the Water Resources Commission (here is the complete A-Z State Organization Index, an alphabetical list of government organizations, including every commission, department, and bureau in the Commonwealth) submit their spending plans for the next fiscal year to one of eleven state Executive Offices.
There are fifteen community colleges in the Bay State, and we work together through our Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges to develop a list of budget and legislative priorities, which we share directly with the governor’s office and legislature, and with the state’s Department of Higher Education, which submits its proposed budget to the Executive Office of Education.
This year, some of the priorities for the community colleges that we shared included $130 million for the state’s “Free Community College” programs (MassReconnect and MassEducate); increases to our campus base budgets; $21 million for the SUCCESS (Supporting Urgent Community College Equity through Student Services) initiative (to serve the thousands of new students arriving on campus for Free Community College); $125 million for capital needs (building updates, renovations, and construction); and, importantly, additional resources to more adequately pay faculty and staff (Massachusetts pays considerably less than the national average).
In addition to allocating money to state agencies, the annual budget also regularly includes “outside sections,” which are ways to pass policy proposals or laws as part of the overall budget package.
As an example, last year the community colleges supported an “outside section” in the budget that would require graduating high school students in the state to either complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or to opt out of applying. As Representative Andy Vargas, uAspire Policy Director Femi Stoltz, and I explained in CommonWealth Beacon, each year thousands of graduating high school students in Massachusetts, mostly in low-income communities, leave more than $50M in federal aid behind and don’t consider college because they think they cannot afford it.
For its part, thanks to an additional revenue generated by the Fair Share Amendment, the Department of Higher Education called for spending between 25-33% of Fair Share funds on higher education in FY26, investing in more financial aid for the state’s lowest income students, ensuring all low-income students have access to wraparound academic support services, and the creation of a new “Innovation Trust Fund” that would provide multi-year support for innovative special projects.
While all of this is going on, the Administration (i.e., Governor’s office) holds public hearings on the budget proposals from all those state agencies and considers public feedback, while the Budget Bureau forecasts what tax and other forms of revenue are likely to be for the next year so the Governor can decide how to prioritize where the money gets spent.
This year, those revenue forecasts are trickier than usual, since we don’t yet know what the full impact will be of the significant proposed federal budget reductions, including big ticket items like Medicaid; and since Massachusetts, known for its higher education institutions, scientific research, and biotech industry, seems to have a particular target on its back with the Trump administration.
January – April
While we lobby and debate
So it will have everything
That we need for our students all year
The state’s Constitution requires that the Governor must propose a budget for the next fiscal year within three weeks of the Legislature convening its new session. Since the Legislature typically convenes just after the holidays in early January, most years this means the Governor delivers a “State of the State” address and releases a proposed budget, called either “House 1” or “House 2” depending on whether it is the first or second year of the legislative session, by the fourth Wednesday of January.
And so it was that on January 22, four months ago, Governor Healey released her “House 1” budget for fiscal year 2026, a $59.6 billion proposal that laid out the funding for all of those hundreds of state agencies (like community colleges) that depend on it, and for her other spending priorities, which this year include housing affordability, universal pre-K access in Gateway Cities, early literacy, transportation infrastructure, and addressing the woeful state of the MBTA.
Governor Healey’s higher ed funding proposals included increases to campus operational budgets; $125 million toward a new $2.5 billion higher ed bond bill; and mostly level funding for other items like Free Community College and the SUCCESS fund.
Level funding, as the state’s fifteen community colleges are seeing historically large enrollment increases, is a huge caution flag waving for the Commonwealth’s new Free Community College effort. Without additional funds to serve the thousands of new students arriving on campuses, at some point soon Massachusetts will have to follow the lead of other states, like Oregon or California, that have not sustained sufficient support for increased enrollment, and had to change eligibility requirements, or turn students away.
Once complete, the governor’s “House 1” budget is delivered to the Ways and Means Committee (a.k.a. the budget committee) for the House of Representatives.
The House then has a few weeks to develop their own version of the budget (usually agreeing with many of the governor’s ideas while ignoring others), to discuss and debate them, make amendments, and take a vote.
This year, the House of Representatives released its version of the fiscal year 2026 budget on April 16. In several ways, it agreed with the governor’s proposals, including modest increases for campus operational budgets (which the House would allocate through the Community College Performance Funding Formula), and otherwise mostly flat budget lines (or, in the case of SUCCESS, a modest decrease).
The House’s budget also included $27,135,470 for NECC’s annual state appropriation for operating expenses (a little more than a third of the $80 million budget the college’s Board of Trustees will be considering on June 4 for our total FY26 budget).
Once the House’s initial budget is made public, representatives have a few days to offer amendments, usually based on requests from their constituents and state agencies. For example, this year we asked for an amendment that would add $7 million to the House’s proposed SUCCESS budget, taking it from $14-21 million (it was not adopted).
After the House votes on and passes its budget, the bill is assigned a new number, “engrossed,” and sent to the Ways and Means Committee for the Senate.
May – August
At least we hope and pray that they met
Our requests in the state’s big budget
The Senate then has a few weeks to take the governor’s proposed budget priorities, along with the budget bill passed by the House, develop their own budget, hold hearings, offer amendments, debate, and take their own vote.
This year, the Senate approved its version of the fiscal year 2026 budget on May 6.
This year, the Senate’s budget was quite similar to the governor’s and the House’s budgets, and included modest increases to campus operational budgets, level support for Free Community College, and an additional $2 million for the SUCCESS Fund, bringing its total to $16 million (still $5 million short of what the community colleges were originally aiming for, but more helpful than flat funding).
Significantly, the Senate budget also heeded our call to pay attention to faculty and staff salaries and proposes $200,000 for a classification study of all faculty and staff positions covered by the Massachusetts Community College Council (MCCC). While this is not itself a salary increase, if enacted in the final state budget, it would be an important step in that direction for community college employees.
We filed an amendment to increase the SUCCESS budget to $18 million which garnered the support of several senators, including NECC’s own Senators Barry Finegold and Pavel Payano. However, there were 1,058 amendments filed, which would have added more than $2 billion to the state budget. While the Senate did approve more than $70 million in additional spending on regional library systems, Boys and Girls clubs, reducing fares for low-income T-riders and other line items, our SUCCESS amendment, along with most of the others, was not adopted.
With both the House and Senate budgets voted on and finalized, the next step in the annual budget process is the creation of a “Conference Committee” consisting of three members of the House of Representatives and three members of the Senate who confer and resolve differences between the two budgets to create the “Conference Committee Report.”
And this is where we find ourselves today, May 22: Once appointed, the Conference Committee will meet over the next few weeks with the goal of delivering its report, the final, un-amendable proposed budget from the legislature, back to the Governor for her consideration.
The next few weeks in this process are the final opportunity for state agencies, like community colleges, and others with an interest in the budget to appeal to their senators and representatives and get their resources or their legislation into the final Conference Committee Report.
When the Governor receives that final Conference Committee Report she will have ten days to review it and either approve it as is (quite rare), veto the entire thing (also rare), or veto particular line items or sections (very common). She cannot add anything.
Ideally, this will all be accomplished in time for the state to start its new fiscal year on July 1, though Massachusetts has become known for taking its time (it has been more than fourteen years since Massachusetts passed its last on-time budget), and we are often the last state in America to wrap it up—just in time for a short summer vacation before “budget season” starts all over again.
Here at NECC, and at community colleges across the Commonwealth, we’re grateful for the positive attention our campuses and our students have received recently, but also concerned and hopeful, now that we have opened our doors even wider, that we will receive the resources needed to support all of those students.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed (and our toes tapping) that our biggest priorities make it into that final bill…
