Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 12, 1995 TAG: 9504180042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The shortfall amounts to only 4 percent of Tech's annual instructional budget of nearly $300 million, and administrators say they think they've found ways to whittle it to $4 million, or about 1.3 percent of the instructional budget. But the new cutting comes on top of five years of cutbacks that have gone beyond efficiency improvements to start taking a toll on quality. And the projected shortfall does not include possible costs of a state-imposed buyout program for noninstructional personnel. (Tech already has had its own buyout for instructional faculty.)
The shortfall didn't just arise last week. For some time, Tech administrators say, they've known that budget adjustments would have to be made for the 1995-96 fiscal year. But they couldn't know the size of the shortfall, they say, until the 1995 General Assembly - which held its "veto session" last week - had completed its work.
A valid observation, only up to a point. Tech President Paul Torgersen has acknowledged that he may have let one contributing factor - a decline since 1990 in enrollment of higher-paying out-of-state students - "creep up on us." Better management of the latest crunch, even if all the details were not yet known, could have led to an earlier start in dealing with it.
Even so, the heart of the problem lies not in Blacksburg, or on the other campuses forced to deal with the low priority placed nowadays by state policy-makers on higher education. The problem is in Richmond. Virginia has plummeted to nearly last in the nation in per-student support of higher education. Tech had to spend much of the 1995 legislative session fighting just to retain funding that had already been appropriated in the biennial budget. In Charlottesville, the University of Virginia now relies so heavily on private support that calling it a state institution may be a misnomer.
Tech, like most other Virginia colleges and universities, is not so richly endowed as UVa with private resources. Moreover, Gov. George Allen not only has continued low-funding policies begun during the revenue crunch of the Wilder years. He also has imposed a cap of 3 percent on annual tuition increases for in-state students.
Out-of-state tuition is a prospective source of new revenues - except that out-of-staters are getting wise to the Virginia scam. Overall, out-of-state applications to Virginia's colleges and universities this year were down by 20 percent. Tech's 1995-96 out-of-state enrollment is expected to be down by nearly 10 percent from 1990-91. Why should an out-of-state student pay more than the actual cost of his or her education (the figures vary from campus to campus; at Tech, it's 117 percent) for a product of declining value?
As the number of out-of-state customers willing to pay top dollar for the privilege of attending a public college or university in the commonwealth continues to drop, the budgetary impact is less important than the message it portends for Virginians. Out-of-staters put off by the ever-larger classes, prospective loss of top faculty, denigration of research and so forth can simply choose to attend college elsewhere; Virginians must live permanently with the damage.
by CNB