
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 19, 1995                   TAG: 9508210027
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DON'T PLAY GAMES WITH TAG

FOR 20 YEARS, the state's Tuition Assistance Grant program has been providing financial assistance to Virginians enrolled at private colleges. Now, those colleges are pushing for enough of a boost in the TAG appropriation to raise the annual per-student grant for the 1996-98 biennium from the current $1,460 per student to $2,000. Their case is strong; the time to act has arrived.

The TAG program, amounting to about $20 million a year, has traditionally drawn broad and bipartisan support, reflecting the breadth of the benefits it provides. But familiarity breeds inattention. The per-student grant is virtually the same now as in 1988-89, even though tuition at the private colleges has risen by more than 50 percent.

Tuition at Virginia's more heavily subsidized public institutions climbed at an even faster percentage rate during that period, but from a much smaller base. Hence, the gap between average public-college and private-college tuition in Virginia climbed from less than $4,500 in 1988-89 to more than $6,800 in 1994-95. Seven years ago, the TAG grant of $1,450 made up 32 percent of the difference; last year, the grant of $1,460 made up only 21 percent of it.

The program benefits the private colleges, of course, and those Virginians who wish to attend them. But it benefits the public interest as well.

First, the existence of a healthy private sector in higher education diversifies the system in ways that would be costly for public institutions to replicate.

In Virginia, the major research universities and the big urban institutions are all public. Underrepresented in the public sector, however, are small schools specializing in undergraduate liberal-arts education - which is precisely what's offered by the typical private college in the state.

Second, Virginia's private colleges provide a safety valve for fluctuations in higher-education demand.

Virginia is expected to need tens of thousands of new student places over the next decade. The private colleges estimate they could provide as many as 7,000 if their tuition can be kept within reach. TAGs cost the state less than $1,500 per student per year, up to $2,000 if the colleges' request is met. The average appropriation for each in-state student at a Virginia public institution is $3,500 annually - a figure that does not include costs of the capital-outlay significant expansion presumably will entail.

That TAGs are a relative bargain helps answer the question of why they should be a high-priority item at a time when public-institution funding has dropped so dramatically in Virginia. (Another part of the answer is that Virginia's public colleges and universities also ought to be a high priority in Richmond.)

Potential erosion of the public-private distinction is also worth keeping an eye on. But it hasn't been a problem in the program's first 20 years - and boosting the size of the TAG grants, which go to individual students rather than to the colleges directly, isn't apt to make the private colleges any more vulnerable than their partaking of federal funds already makes them.

Talk of privatizing some public services, and of forging public-private partnerships, is popular these days, at least in the abstract. TAGs are a concrete manifestation, from a time before they became buzz phrases, of how such ideas can be put into workable practice. This partnership between state government and the commonwealth's private colleges deserves strengthening.

by CNB