Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 12, 1995 TAG: 9501140005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The stats are stark.
Since 1990, the state's per-student funding has dropped by a third. In the past six years, Virginia's per-student state support of higher education has fallen from 28th to 43rd in the nation, and appears on the verge of taking another plunge.
"Like the physicist who wants to get to absolute zero," former Gov. Gerald Baliles asked last week in Richmond, "are we aiming for the absolute bottom, for 50th among the states?"
The colleges have responded in a couple of ways.
First, as many students and parents are keenly aware, they have raised tuition. Today, more than half the cost of educational programs at state institutions in Virginia is paid for by tuition. It used to be one-third.
Second, they are restructuring themselves to reduce costs. The tuition increases, however painful for those who pay them, are too little to offset the state's financial retreat.
Enrollment statewide rose 27 percent over the past eight years; staff rose only 8 percent. At Virginia Tech, per-student costs rose by 3.1 percent from 1988-89 through 1992-93; during the same period the Consumer Price Index rose 17.7 percent and the Higher Education Price Index, 18.7 percent.
Necessity can be the mother of virtuous invention. A closer lookout for cost-saving efficiencies, a readier willingness to adapt to change - that's the good side of the story.
The other side is that Virginia, or at least its political leadership, increasingly appears not to recognize higher education's full value. Since Gov. Douglas Wilder began slashing budgets to close recession-induced revenue shortfalls, higher education always seems first on the chopping block. Gov. George Allen's micromanaging initiatives, and his proposal to gut the State Council of Higher Education, inspire little confidence that his aim is an improved, rather than a truncated, system.
Reliance on tuition increases has been both cause and effect of the blinkered view that students, particularly undergraduates, are invariably higher education's principal customers. The more they're seen as the customers, the more they should foot the bill, as a kind of user fee. The more they foot the bill, the more they must be regarded as the definitive customers.
But higher education is of value to more than just students. It is of value to the state as a whole, and that value is not only as producer of educated citizenry and competent work force, vital as this is. Higher education's value to the state and its taxpayers also can (and did) lie in such roles as discovering new knowledge and disseminating existing knowledge beyond the campus. Indeed, it is not too much to suggest that at some institutions - certainly not all, or most, but at some - research and graduate training ought to be at least as important as undergraduate instruction.
Such views once were commonplace, because their validity has been proved many times over. Now they suddenly, somehow have become heresy in Virginia - even as universities' role as engines of economic development is becoming more evident. What started five years ago as an emergency response to fiscal crisis is now, in flusher times, the paradigm. Cut the colleges. Who needs 'em? Never mind yesterday. Never mind tomorrow.
by CNB