THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 29, 1994 TAG: 9408270010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
They've come to reality kicking and screaming, dragged by the legislature's demand for restructuring or else - or else a 1.5 percent cut in their annual state funding. But Virginia's colleges and universities finally are facing up to a fact of the '90s: They must find ways to do more with less.
At a hearing last week before the Higher Education Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, university officials promised to take the kind of cost-saving measures that this time last year most of them spurned.
At that time, then-Gov. Doug Wilder was warning college presidents either to ``lead the way to facilitate change or have change dictate the rules.'' Old Dominion University, led by President Jim Koch, and the community college system were even then leading the way in efficiency and innovation, not to mention good grace, among the commonwealth's institutions of higher learn-ing.
But most college presidents, having met a 20 percent cut in state funding with double-digit hikes in student tuition, were warning Wilder that his proposed 15 percent reduction in state funding without permission to hike tuition would mean some Virginia schools would close. This time last year, they offered this alternative: streamlined university budgets in exchange for another $223 million in state aid.
That was a non-starter with a General Assembly facing a half-billion-dollar def-i-cit.
What the colleges ended up facing was a two-year timetable for serious restructuring - cutting marginal courses and de-grees, raising faculty teaching requirements, redoubling technological ap-proaches to teaching, privatizing ancillary operations like food service.
The first benchmark, each colleges' specific restructuring plan, was initially proposed for June 1994. George Allen, then the governor-elect, prevailed upon the legislature to extend that deadline to Sept. 1. He has offered the carrot of $23.4 million more in state funds if colleges will hold rises in tuition to the rate of inflation. And he has postponed the stick of 1.5 percent budget cuts for schools that don't produce adequate plans and progress to the 1995-96 budget.
Last Monday's hearing, a preview legislators seemed to find reassuring, was just that: a preview. The college population of Virginia is expected to rise by an additional 70,000 students by the year 2000. The changing demographics that influx portends and the changing job market both require new strategies, something beyond the business-as-usual of raising taxing and tuition. by CNB