Virginia Commonwealth University pulled a fast one last week. In announcing the tuition increases approved by the Board of Visitors Friday, the administration omitted explicit mention of a not insignificant item — the fact that the tuition and fees paid by incoming freshmen and transfer students taking a normal course load next year will be 21% higher than entering students in the current year.
That, former VCU Dean Robert D. Holsworth was quoted in the Times-Dispatch as saying, amounts to “the most massive increase in tuition in Virginia history.”
VCU spun the story as a modest 4.2% increase in tuition for current in-state students, along with a complex restructuring of the tuition system from a flat charge per semester to a charge based on the number of credit hours. But depending upon the particular scenario, says Holsworth, one of only two board members to vote against the tuition package, some students could wind up paying 27% more!
So much for Governor Bob McDonnell’s request to Virginia universities to hold tuition hikes to the inflation rate (1.5% in the past 12 months). And so much for the governor influencing higher ed policy through his appointments to boards of visitors. Twelve of VCU’s 16 board members are McDonnell appointees. Only two members — Holsworth and Alexander B. McMurtrie — opposed the package.
Predictably, VCU administrators blamed cutbacks in state support for higher education. State support for VCU fell from $225.6 million in 2007, before the Great Recession, to $186.9 million in the current fiscal year, a decline of $38.7 million. (I pulled those numbers from state budget documents. VCU president Michael Rao put the decline at $52 million.)
What the administration did not stress in public comments is the fact that the university more than made up the difference by hiking tuition and other charges. Other (non-state) spending increased $169 million in Fiscal 2007 to $828 million in Fiscal 2014. That sufficed to increase overall VCU revenues by about 15% over that same seven-year period compared to cumulative inflation of 13%.
Next year’s tuition increase will make VCU less affordable and accessible to the first-generation college students the university has served in the past, Holsworth said. VCU students already shoulder the second heaviest debt load upon graduation in the state. These aggressive hikes could well push it into the No. 1 spot. “My concern is about the students and parents,” he told me. “Does anyone institutionally speak for those families any more?”
According to the T-D, President Rao said that the only alternative to the tuition increase would be “to lower our ambitions.”
The VCU board action kept alive the institution’s ambition, like that of every other college and university, to rise in the esteem of students, faculty, peers and the U.S. News & World-Report annual rankings. As for the desire of future students to graduate without crippling debt, they’ll have to adjust their ambitions a little lower.
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