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

DATE: MONDAY, August 28, 1995                   TAG: 9508280146
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LOWERING HURDLES TO HIGHER ED

THIS FALL, 100 graduates of Virginia's public community colleges will each get $3,500 from the state to further their educations at one of three private four-year colleges in the commonwealth: Averett in Danville, Bluefield in Bluefield, and St. Paul's in Lawrenceville. The pilot program is one good example of how higher education must work to cope with the challenges hurled at it by a fast-changing world.

Some of those challenges are nationally applicable; others, specific to Virginia. Among the latter: enrollment projections showing that, by the turn of the century, as many as 60,000 more students may be seeking places in the state's colleges and universities. That number is being adjusted downward, but it's still significant.

Like Virginia's Tuition Assistance Grants, which this year will give about $1,400 per student to 13,000 Virginians attending private colleges in the state, the grants for community-college transfers help the state meet increasing demand in cost-efficient fashion.

The $3,500 equals the average taxpayer subsidy for instructional costs of Virginia students at public colleges and universities. The state saves potential capital-outlay costs, however, and buys itself a measure of flexibility if projections change or actual enrollments fail to conform to expectations. Not every state faces such an enrollment-increase projection; the numbers are based not on an inexorable nationwide trend but on such assumptions as in-migration and military downsizing.

But accommodating increasing numbers of students in efficient fashion is only part of higher education's challenge. Another is the task of ensuring that the American work force will have sufficient opportunities for the kind of education - including adult education as workers continually refashion their skills - necessary to the labor force of a 21st-century economy.

This entails a broadening of educational opportunities for nontraditional students, many of whom - for reasons of family or marital status, economic condition, or place of employment - cannot travel far from home to go to school. Averett, Bluefield and St. Paul's are in parts of the state where no four-year public institutions exist nearby, and where populations are too small to justify the sort of array of public-institution off-campus courses that are or ought to be in the Roanoke Valley.

The three private colleges in the new grant program for community-college transfers are all in Southside or Southwest Virginia, where - as in the rest of the South - the percentages of adults with college degrees lag behind the country as a whole. (Statewide, Virginia has a more highly educated population than the country as a whole, but this reflects the heavy influence of Northern Virginia on statewide averages.)

The Southern Regional Education Board has set a goal of bringing college-education levels in the region up to national norms. One way to make that happen, says a recent SREB report, is to improve the transfer rate from two-year to four-year institutions - to the sorts of levels envisioned, but not achieved, when the states set up their community-college systems.

The same social and economic hurdles that turn students toward two-year rather than four-year institutions in the first place, suggests the SREB, can block their transfer to a four-year institution later, even when that was the intent. It's good to look for ways, including public-private partnerships, to lower the hurdles.

by CNB