Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993 TAG: 9309120337
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Finally.
His first year was 1988. Short of money, he had to drop out in January 1990. He spent the next two years cleaning bathrooms at a nursing home and hauling boxes for a moving company. All to get back to college.
Harvey returned in January 1992, but he has to work 32 hours a week as a stockman to get by. The soft-spoken physics major hopes to graduate by 1995 - nine years after he got out of high school.
Still, Harvey counts his blessings: "I'm one of the lucky ones. I've seen guys come and go, good guys who came in with us as freshmen and never made it. They had to give it up. It was a choice of surviving or going to school."
Since 1990, Virginia's tuition and fees have soared. They threaten to reach $128,000 by 2009 for four years' tuition, room and board at public colleges and $250,000 for private schools, financial planners say.
High school counselors say this hasn't dissuaded many students from attending college. "I haven't seen any great change or slowdown," said Raymond Stokes, guidance director at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, which sends 80 percent of its graduates to college.
Though enrollments at state schools are higher than ever, thousands of students are struggling. They've had to set their dreams a notch or two lower, going to UVa instead of Harvard, VCU instead of UVa, a community college instead of any four-year school.
They've had to juggle classes and work, delaying graduation for years. They've had to borrow thousands of dollars.
If double-digit tuition increases keep coming, counselors fear higher education could become a privilege for the well-to-do, with lower-income students scared of even trying to enroll.
Ray Gargiulo has seen this version of "sticker shock."
"We tell kids there's plenty of money if they don't have any, but the kids won't believe you," said Gargiulo, of the Greater Richmond Area Scholarship Program, which helps students find aid. "The problem is, the parents hear that everything's expensive."
Said James Alessio, associate director of research for the State Council of Higher Education: "It's really difficult to determine: Where is the magic point? How high can you raise the price of tuition before people stop going? We won't find out until we hit it."
Following are stories of students struggling to get what some regard as a right: a college degree.
Patrice Robinson always planned to go to a four-year college. By the time she graduated in May, she'd been accepted to three.
But she's attending J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond.
"I wanted to go to Hampton, but it cost $13,000," said Robinson, a graduate of John Marshall High School in Richmond. "I wanted to go to a four-year school; all my friends are going there. But I'm stuck here."
Robinson is 16. She skipped the 11th grade, the year most students begin thinking seriously about college.
"It never really hit me how expensive it was," she said. "My parents would help me if they could, but they can't right now."
She hopes she can earn money to transfer to someplace bigger, maybe James Madison University.
Students often cannot afford their first choices, Gargiulo said.
"I tell parents this, and it goes over like a lead balloon: The college you want to send your kids to and the college you can afford are two different colleges."
Community colleges are teeming. Full-time enrollment has shot up by 40 percent over the past decade, from 25,776 in 1985 to 36,208 a year ago. Experts say community college and trade school enrollment will keep rising as more adults head back for extra study and students seek cheap detours from four-year colleges.
But the number of part-time students, often adults with full-time jobs, has dropped. The state's community college board feared the reason was that part-time students were ineligible for state-funded aid.
So, this spring the board approved stipends for part-timers. "We hope this will at least get them over the hurdle," said Joy Graham, an assistant chancellor with the community college system.
Sandi Stovall knew it would be a financial strain to put two daughters through college at the same time. So Stovall, a divorced mother in Richmond, saved.
What looked like a lot of money went quickly, though, in Sonja's first year at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte in 1991. Tuition was $5,730, books another $55 each.
Tuition rose the next year, and Stovall had to plan for Felicia, her second daughter. Sonja, now 21, moved home to attend Virginia Commonwealth University.
Sandi Stovall, director of festivals for the Richmond Arts Council, didn't want her daughters borrowing; it had been a burden to pay her own debts at the University of Maryland. So when Felicia wanted a break after graduating from high school, Sandi welcomed the decision as a chance to save money and research other sources of aid.
Felicia Stovall, a shy 18-year-old, is cooking and waitressing at Richmond's 2300 Club. She hopes to go to culinary school next year.
"We're all struggling," said Sandi Stovall. "It takes planning to be a success."
Admissions officers are seeing more Sonja Stovalls, students who stay in the state or in their hometowns for college. VCU has always been a commuter school, but housing director Bernie Mann said he's seen an increase in the number of freshman living at home.
"It's just another way of cutting costs," he said.
Tracy Hilker immersed herself in planning, but it almost didn't help.
When her daughter Brittany reached kindergarten, Hilker decided to finish the college education she had started six years earlier.
A divorced mother from Virginia Beach who receives child support, Hilker spent more than 80 hours in the library researching scholarship possibilities.
She found 20 likely money sources and got responses from two. The rest came back "address unknown" or "only company employees are eligible."
But she feels lucky. Hilker, 27, landed a $4,000 scholarship from the Norfolk Foundation. When she graduates, she'll be in debt about $8,000, less than many of her friends.
"I can't complain when I look at what I'll have when I graduate," she said.
Students looking for grants from the federal government have to search just as hard. Over the past decade, the government has tilted sharply toward loans. In 1980, it offered $6.7 billion in grants and $6.9 billion in loans. In 1990, the grant level dropped to $6.5 billion, but the amount of loans increased to $13.9 billion.
"In today's job market, more reliance on loans is not good for society," Donald J. Finley, associate director of the State Council of Higher Education, said, referring to escalating loan defaults.
Time was, students would reject work-study opportunities if they found grants or loans. Now, even the much-loathed dining hall jobs are filled, said Anne H. Clarke, director of financial aid at Virginia Tech.
Last year, a presidential commission criticized the financial aid system as inadequate, and suggested guaranteeing every student $14,000 annually in a mix of loans and grants determined by income. That never happened.
President Clinton, during last year's campaign, promised his community-service plan would help many college students. A streamlined version recently approved by Congress would have room for no more than 100,000 students nationwide - fewer than the students at Virginia's four largest schools. Two years of service would get students $4,725 a year.
Virginia made a huge increase in state-funded financial aid. The amount more than doubled from $19.7 million in 1991 to $47.7 million this year - the biggest increase in the country, Alessio said.
That covers only 45 percent of students' needs, Finley said. Students struggle to find the remainder. "Like with anything else, if you want it badly enough, you'll find a way to get it."
A year in the life of Brian Bernish: Go to high school, clean up a dentist's office, sell menswear. Drive home with drooping eyelids, do homework, sleep.
Save money for college. Save more.
Another year: Watch a hurricane flatten the Florence, S.C., plant where your father works. Use your $7,000 savings to help your family while your dad is out of work. Forget about college for a year.
"In August 1990, I was feeling like the world dumped on me," said Bernish, a junior at Virginia Tech. "I used some of my money and bought a CD player. That kept me sane."
Bernish worked three jobs the year after high school and earned enough for his college freshman year. At the time, Tech was cheaper than schools in New Jersey, where his family had moved. Bernish moved to Blacksburg with a ledger in his suitcase and kept track of every expense.
Then tuition, in keeping with a law requiring out-of-state students to pay at least the full cost of college, increased beyond his reach.
His school year included a long appeal to get himself declared independent of his parents, making it easier to get financial aid and in-state status.
"Go to a financial aid office and the people out there all have some pretty colorful stories," Bernish said. "Each story, in itself, is unique, but the stress is really common."
The financial aid forms didn't have space to explain Bernish's special circumstance. The short-staffed financial aid office wouldn't have time to inspect such information anyway.
"You go into a financial aid office and you say, `Listen to the facts you don't have,' " said Alessio, from the state council. "The financial aid officer can use professional judgment. . . . I don't think that's communicated that well to folks."
Bernish got his reprieve, but it's gotten tougher to obtain independent status as more families were using the technique to get tax breaks and grants.
Through most of high school, two brothers from El Salvador bussed tables and washed dishes nearly eight hours a day at an Arlington restaurant. Sent here alone to escape war in their country, they attended classes by day, worked afternoons and studied at night.
Both were voted "Best International Student" in high school.
That didn't make them eligible for financial aid, however, which is reserved for citizens.
The brothers, legal U.S. residents, continued to work, saving money for a few community college classes.
"At this rate, they'll probably finish college around 2010," said Carole Lopez, who had been their guidance counselor at Washington & Lee High School.
Even those who have become citizens are plagued by the complexities of financial aid forms or they consider the aid a form of welfare they're too proud to accept.
In Northern Virginia cities like Fairfax, where 20 percent of students come from overseas, some talented immigrants are finding it impossible to pursue a college degree. The problem will spread far beyond Washington, Los Angeles and Miami next century as the flood of immigrants continues, demographers say.
The boys from El Salvador, now men, have lived and paid taxes in Virginia five years. At Northern Virginia Community College, which has 186 students from El Salvador, they are considered in-state students.
Not all schools have the same interpretation of Virginia's domicile law. For this reason, the brothers did not want their names used in this story.
The older brother, 23, tried going to George Mason, but found the tuition, $3,888 for in-state students, unaffordable. At the community college, tuition is $1,056 a year.
"I'm probably the last one to register each semester," he said. "I don't know how much money I'll have by the time school starts."
Harvey, the Norfolk State physics student, said the government hasn't made a commitment to higher education. Most elected officials live above the middle class and can't understand the problems facing poor college students, he said.
"The government doesn't care about education. They tell you you have to have it, but they don't make an effort to help you get it. I'm not saying handouts, we need this, we need that. Just give us a helping hand.
"The way you struggle to go through school and to survive - it's real tough. It's real tough."
Philip Walzer of The Virginian-Pilot contributed to this story.
by CNB