Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502030042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
State support is crucial to keeping tuitions within reach of many students. But as state support has diminished, federal appropriations for student aid also have dropped, by 9 percent between 1980 and 1993.
At the same time, studies predict a 33 percent increase in the number of high-school graduates nationwide in the next 14 years.
These trends occur at a time when the public is warned that workers must be well-educated, computer-literate and equipped with critical-thinking skills. Otherwise, they risk a hard landing on the wrong side of a widening economic gulf between skilled and unskilled labor.
California, where low student fees make the university system highly accessible, already is dealing - or, rather, failing to deal - with a crush of students. Many students cannot get required courses because there are too few sections to accommodate them. The situation promises to deteriorate, a recent report in The Wall Street Journal indicates.
Among the proposals kicked around in La-La Land: massive elimination of graduate-degree programs, reduced access to students older than 24, and a ban on out-of-state admissions. Unthinkable? The California Higher Education Policy Center is thinking all of it.
Not that Virginia is in this situation. No, far from being highly accessible, the state's four-year colleges charge the second-highest tuition of public systems in the country.
Is higher education more efficient in the 48 states that charge students less? The evidence suggests otherwise. Public colleges elsewhere have lower tuitions because other states pick up more of the tab than here. Virginia ranks 43rd in state per-student support of higher education, just ahead of Alabama.
Starting with the tight budget years of the Wilder administration, Virginia has cut $432 million in support for higher education. Tuitions have soared, and colleges and universities have scrambled to streamline.
Gov. George Allen's proposed budget amendments would hit them again, and hard. To get money for prisons and a tax cut, he proposed squeezing state colleges and universities for another $47.4 million. That's on top of the $14.7 million cut previously built into the second year of the state's 1994-96 biennial budget. It would drop Virginia to 45th in per-student funding.
Leading businessmen, including some Republicans, have warned that Virginia can ill afford to treat its higher-education system as an afterthought. So have three former Virginia governors. Wrote Democrat Gerald Baliles and Republicans Linwood Holton and Mills Godwin in a letter to the General Assembly's leadership:
"Virginia's excellent and diverse system of higher education must be among our most crucial future investments. The economic progress we need will not happen if Virginia's universities remain mired near the bottom in public support ...."
Despite differences of opinion over the appropriateness of various kinds of state activities, most agree that encouraging economic development is an important task for the state to undertake. Doing it well, however, means more than ad hoc inducements to individual prospects. It means, among other things, an educational system good enough and accessible enough both to produce potential creators of high-value jobs and to ensure that Virginia has the kind of high-skill labor force for which employers with high-value jobs look.
by CNB