Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995 TAG: 9506300100
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV20 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
All the students clear out, but the amenities of a college town remain. You can even park on campus. With most classes running four or five days a week, you can focus on your schoolwork and ease your regular school-year load. And you'll be left with plenty of time to do what you want: hike parts of the Appalachian Trail, or play in McCoy Falls.
It sure sounded better than last summer, when Famuliner was a cashier in the beer garden at Busch Gardens near home. So the psychology major signed up for "The Literature of Rock and Roll," a "neat class I couldn't pass up" worth three credits, and a good internship with a New River social service agency doing a variety of activities with kids of all ages. And she still has her time free from Thursday afternoon to Monday night each week.
Not a bad way to spend the summer.
That's what Virginia Tech administrators thought two years ago, when they decided to boost summer school enrollment with a 15 percent discount on tuition. The idea also was to increase the university's four-year enrollment rate, make better use of class space, and give students an opportunity to pick up classes that might be filled during the regular school year.
The sale worked. The cost for a three-credit course dropped from $382.75 for in-state undergraduates to $354, and 150 extra students signed up for the May-June session in 1993.
Summer school is still discounted 15 percent below regular school-year rates, but enrollment has dropped during this first session of summer school from 5,921 undergraduate and graduate students last year to an estimated 4,694. The second summer school session starts July 3.
A big part of the drop seems to be a policy change in the graduate school, which accounted for at least 700 students, said John Eaton, associate dean of the graduate school. Starting this year, graduate students who have finished their course work don't have to enroll in summer school if they are only in town working on a dissertation or thesis.
"It was a decision that was made because we had a circumstance where policy inconsistencies caused some students to be registering and paying and others not," Eaton said.
In addition, tuition and fees have crept up: An undergraduate three-credit course costs $389.25 - and a hefty $1,076.25 for out-of-state students. Graduate students pay $596.25 if they're from Virginia, $905.25 if they're not.
Planners built in a $350,000 budget drop because of the graduate school policy change, said budget director Dwight Shelton.
"We will have to wait to see what's going to happen with undergraduates," he said, because firm numbers for the second session won't be in for a few weeks.
Still, Shelton said he doesn't believe the drop "is a big deal to us at all," because summer school tuition makes up only 5 percent or 6 percent of the total tuition budget - which, in turn, is 37 percent of Tech's estimated $220 million instructional budget.
"Even if we're down 10 percent, that's only 10 percent of a relatively small portion of our budget," he said.
Administrators attribute the sluggish enrollment to Tech's rural location and the region's relatively few summer jobs.
"As much as we'd like to boost summer school figures, it's important - but not overly important," said Larry Hincker, university spokesman.
"We're a rural, residential-type university. We know most of our students are going to go home," he said. "They need to go home. Where they're going to summer school is George Mason and [Old Dominion University]. This is not an urban area, and students are not going to find a lot of work."
Northern Virginia Community College has about 800 more students this summer than last year, thanks in part to an ad campaign aimed at students at four major state universities, including Tech, urging them to come to summer school if they were home, said a spokeswoman there.
Locally, both Radford University and New River Community College find their summer school enrollments are flat, said representatives from both schools.
"I think that students are taking advantage of a little better job market to earn income to go to school," said Ed Barnes, president at New River. "We're experiencing the same enrollment pattern that Virginia Tech is. Tuition is relatively high in Virginia right now. My guess is, we're going to lose students on the lower end of the economic scale."
Among those working their way through school is Hayley Dispirito, a Tidewater resident who is business manager at Tech's Collegiate Times for the coming year. It's a busy job that has already started, alongside her second job waiting tables.
"[Students] don't stay here for a job," she said. "I found it real, real hard to find a second job."
Rita Purdy, associate dean of the College of Human Resources, thinks the local job outlook is part of the equation.
"It's not a simple situation," she said. "I think our location really hurts us a lot. Lots of students want to come to summer school, but they're working. A lot of parents want them home working. One father told me his daughter could earn $8 or $9 an hour working for the federal government in Washington. If she were in Blacksburg, she'd be making minimum wage, at best."
Dairy science student Andrea Snyder went home to St. Albans, W.Va., this summer, where she's helping to care for her younger brother and planning to travel later this summer. Right now, she's taking "Music Appreciation" at West Virginia State College.
She's doing it to get the required class out of the way.
"I don't have a lot of spare [class] slots during the semester," she said. "It seemed to be a fairly easy thing I could just get out of the way."
John White, the assistant dean of her college back at Tech, signed quite a lot of transfer authorizations for students who wanted to take classes out-of-state this summer.
"This is a guess on my part, but I think it's a fairly well-educated guess," he said. "We've seen this trend of numbers going down. It follows a significantly upward trend of tuition going up. People have to save money where they can."
Purdy, in human resources, wonders if Tech might be well-served by beefing up summer school into what amounts to a third semester.
"Let students enroll in spring and summer, and not come in fall," she suggested. "I know some students who literally cannot get [the classes] they need in fall and spring, and a lot of them do come in summer."
And as long as higher education's breaking with tradition, as so many in the field urge, consider Ben Jones. Despite the debate about how to move students through in a timely four years, he is deliberately in no hurry to grab the degree and move on.
Jones, 22, is taking three classes during the two summer school sessions. He'll graduate next year, after six years in college. But he has been creative about his path through school, eyeing a career that he is carefully calculating. He hopes it pays off.
Last year, he honed his business skills as business manager of the Collegiate Times. Next year, he'll work with national ad representatives as the paper's national advertising manager. He'll earn a percentage of what he brings in.
After class one day recently, he hustled out of Derring Hall and over to the Squires Student Center to check in at the office. Jones wore black Adidas shorts and sneakers, and a soccer tournament T-shirt. The upcoming weekend, he would referee a semi-pro soccer game; soon, he would be heading to New Jersey for a weekend to take part in an Olympic soccer-referee training camp. His dream is to get in on the ground floor with the fledgling Major League Soccer, the pro soccer league slated to start up by 1996.
He's making money refereeing, working for the paper, and, to fill in, helping man the Squires information desk.
"I felt like the experience I would gain from some of these extracurricular activities would be as beneficial, or more beneficial," he said. "I've learned a lot, made a lot of connections, and it's ended up being very valuable."
Said university spokesman Hincker:
"We're not so sure students want to get through college quickly."
by CNB