Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410030012
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF DEBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Higher education is a billion-dollar industry locally, and its importance will only grow as the Roanoke region heads toward the next century.
MOST U.S. communities the size of the Roanoke Valley have state universities or a branch of one. Those that don't probably wish they did because universities are good for the local economy.
"Universities are importers of money," said Robert Koepke, editor of Economic Development Review. "It's money that would not be there if not for the university."
Besides being strong economic engines in their own right, universities raise the quality of the regional work force and serve as magnets to business and industry.
"In a knowledge/information-based world, institutions that have knowledge and information as theIr basic commodities will be critical," Koepke said. "The university facilitates a region remaining competitive in an increasingly demanding world. Without one, it's easy for a place to become a backwater."
The New Century Council, a business-oriented group that is working to come up with a regional economic development plan, regards higher education as one of its most important areas of study.
"It's a win-win situation," council executive director Beverly Fitzpatrick said, with Virginia Tech already known as a major research university and Radford University about to launch a College of Global Studies with the aim of producing graduates who can function smoothly in the international economy of the future.
The council has said that higher education is a billion-dollar industry in the region and that some 45,000 people - roughly a tenth of the region's population - are enrolled in its public universities, community colleges and private colleges.
The council is a few months away from making recommendations about higher education or any other subject, but Fitzpatrick said he expects it to take a practical approach, looking less at traditional baccalaureate education than at how schools can help build the work force that will be needed by business and industry in the future.
Jill Barr is co-chairman of the council's committee on higher education. She said it's looking at what employers will need, what the region's schools are turning out, and what can be done to bring the two closer together.
"We feel like the universities could be doing more," said Barr, who is director of economic development for Radford. "We're trying to find out what 'more' is. Our discussion has centered on the assets and how to better utilize them. What do we have that's different, and how do we make better use of it?"
Even the smallest universities spend millions on payroll and for supplies and services. Their students spend millions, too, and the impact of all that spending multiplies as it ripples through the community.
Charles Whiteman, head of the Institute for Economic Research at the University of Iowa, said universities are much like industries. They provide a variety of jobs, both blue- and white-collar. Some are filled by locals, some aren't.
They spend in the community, but they also impose costs. They need streets and utilities, police and fire protection. The children of faculty and staff need schools.
Those costs are considered well worth the payoff in economic benefits to the community.
"A school is an institution" like a hospital or a prison, said April Young, a senior fellow for regional economic development at George Mason University. "It has a payroll, usually a fairly stable one. They employ a lot of people, and a significant number have relatively high-paying jobs."
Besides importing money and spending locally, she said, universities help make jobs by creating information that is then applied to problems through "technology transfer."
"I don't necessarily even mean high technology," Young, a former head of Virginia's Department of Economic Development, said. "I mean the application of appropriate technology. It's finding a better way of doing something."
In a study of its 1990 impact on the economies of the Roanoke and New River valleys, Virginia Tech came up with an estimate of $763 million and called the figure "conservative."
Included were $71 million for real estate and housing, $26 million in retail trade, $19 million for health and medical services, $21 million spent in eating and drinking establishments and another $10 million for entertainment and personal services.
Radford University estimates its regional economic impact at more than $100 million, based on a 1992-93 study.
Roanoke College has an annual impact of some $53 million on the Roanoke Valley.
"Mainly," President David Gring said, "it's 1,700 students spending money in Roanoke and Salem."
Hollins College has never done a full economic impact study, President Maggie O'Brien said. It nonetheless is a significant player in the valley economy, with a 1994-95 operating budget of $23.6 million - nearly three-quarters of which is spent locally.
'Tech is the key'
The direct economic value of higher education is clear, and Roanoke Valley residents have not missed the message. In the most recent Roanoke Valley Poll, more than 65 percent of respondents favored establishing a state university in the valley.
The same cry is often heard from the business community.
But universities aren't founded to boost the economy. Their purpose is educational, their mission teaching, research and service. There seems scant likelihood of a traditional public university being established in the Roanoke Valley anytime soon.
It would be prohibitively expensive under current economic conditions. Moreover, it would have to be formally justified in terms of existing higher educational opportunities in the valley and any demand for more.
There is nothing in Virginia's long-range higher-education plans about a new university in the area.
Nor are there plans to convert Virginia Western Community College to a four-year institution or to establish a Roanoke Valley branch of Virginia Tech, Radford University, the University of Virginia or any other senior institution in the state.
Instead, the state Council of Higher Education encourages that higher education needs in the region be met by existing institutions and by new ways of doing things, such as making more use of teaching via television. That's not to say the valley is at a standstill in terms of higher education and its economic benefits.
"You don't have to have MIT in your backyard," said Anne Moore Pratt, an associate director of the state Council of Higher Education. "Roanoke has a host of institutions."
In her view, Virginia Tech is prominent among them, despite being some 45 miles away in Blacksburg.
"It's a huge international community," she said. "Virginia Tech is an important resource for the Roanoke Valley."
Roanoke College President Gring agrees.
"The valley does have a four-year public university," he argues. "We spend far too much time explaining that we don't have a four-year public university instead of looking at it geographically and explaining that we do have one.
"We live in a world that constantly is impressing upon us concepts like the global economy. And yet as residents of the Roanoke and New River valleys we find it difficult to draw a circle around an area that's within a 40-minute drive. I think we ought to market ourselves" as having a university.
"Tech is the key to long-term growth in Roanoke," said Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University in West Virginia and a former Virginia secretary of education. "It's in Tech's long-term interest to have a thriving Roanoke Valley."
Virginia Tech's formal Roanoke Valley presence is twofold. It is represented at the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center, where graduate courses in multiple disciplines are offered by Tech along with courses from a number of other state schools.
Tech also owns Hotel Roanoke. Tech is renovating the hotel and building a conference center there in cooperation with the city.
The conference center, which is scheduled to open next spring, will offer noncredit continuing education programs through Tech's Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement.
The center's programs will "develop" employees who work for existing regional business and industry, executive director James Buffer said, and will "without a doubt" eventually help attract new employers to the area.
It will do so in part, Buffer said, by "demonstrating what research has been going on at this university and showing how it can be applied" in business, industry, government and other venues.
Taking classes to people
Despite the immediate unlikelihood, the idea of a valley university remains alive.
Hollins College President O'Brien said she favors a thorough study of the subject in all its ramifications - including the possible effects on the valley's existing higher-education "dynamics." At all times, she said, the foremost consideration should be the public interest.
"I welcome the argument," O'Brien said. "I don't know of a city in America that has too many colleges and universities. I just don't think that happens."
Roanoke funeral home owner Lawrence Hamlar and businessman E. Cabell Brand, longtime chairman of the Total Action Against Poverty board, are interested because they'd like to find ways of meeting the higher-education needs of "placebound" valley residents.
Those are people who finish high school and two years at Virginia Western Community College but can't go on to get a bachelor's degree because job or family responsibilities prevent them from commuting to Virginia Tech or Radford, and tuition is too high at private Hollins and Roanoke colleges and the Roanoke Center of Mary Baldwin College.
"We want to make a four-year degree affordable and accessible to the nontraditional student," Hamlar said. "We're not necessarily talking about a campus-type university. We're not trying to say how it should be done. We're just saying it should be done. It's still on the drawing board. It isn't dead by a long shot."
Of the Roanoke Valley Poll respondents who favored the idea of a four-year state university in the valley, 29 percent said the best way to do it would be to convert Virginia Western Community College to a four-year institution.
Such a conversion would seem highly impractical. For one thing, officials of the two-year college in Roanoke point to a shortage of room to grow.
Another apparent obstacle, said Pratt of the Council of Higher Education, would be finding political support for a fundamental "mission change" in the popular community college system.
The network of nonresidential schools was established in the 1960s to provide the first two years of technical and liberal arts training to high school graduates at low cost. The idea was for students wishing to go on to transfer to a four-year college or university.
Virginia Western's president, Dr. Charles Downs, is skeptical of any conversion talk. In his experience, community colleges that converted to four-year schools "started doing the things larger institutions do, such as limiting enrollment and charging high tuition."
Meeting the valley's higher education needs "can be done better than that and in a more fiscally responsible way," Downs said.
Perhaps a more workable way of broadening the availability of baccalaureate degrees in the Roanoke Valley would be to make greater use of interactive video, which takes the professor to the student instead of the other way around. Already, it's possible for Virginia Western students who have completed their two-year associate's degree to earn a bachelor's degree in engineering technology via instruction sent by television from Old Dominion University in Norfolk. A bachelor's degree in social work from Radford University is available by the same means.
"You could develop a liberal arts or general studies program on the same model," Downs said.
Interactive video also offers the possibility of delivering instruction to other sites - among them inner-city locations where day care might be provided for the children of adult students.
The state council hasn't turned its back on new construction and curricula. Officials point to Radford's College of Global Studies and the new Center for Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University in Harrisonburg as examples.
But in view of costs and evolving technologies, Associate Director Donald Finley said, the council is looking for new ways to deliver higher education with existing resources, interactive video prominent among them.
"We're more interested in doing it that way than in building a traditional bricks and mortar campus," Finley said. "There is a movement away from traditional bricks and mortar as a way of doing these things."
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