SARA SPANGER/COLLEGIATE TIMES
At the same time tuition for Virginia Tech students will rise 11.1 percent in the 2010-11 school year, around 200 faculty and staff positions will be cut.
The Board of Visitors officially approved raising tuition of in-state undergraduates by $854 at its meeting on Monday, June 7.
The tuition rates for the next school year are generally set at the BOV’s spring meeting, which occurred in March. However, the board was waiting on a then-undetermined amount of federal stimulus money. Fees were set in late April by the BOV’s executive committee and were presented to the full BOV during Monday’s meeting.
Overall tuition and fees will rise to $9,589. In-state students will, however, have those costs dropped by $130 after the fact, thanks to federal stimulus money.
The percentage of money provided to the university’s general fund by the state will decrease from 31.5 percent in the 2009-10 school year to 28.9 percent in the 2010-11 school year.
Tuition and fees constituted $306,635,000 of the educational and general portion of the budget last year. This year, they will bring $337,694,000 to the university.
This $31,059,000 increase in total tuition and student fees reflects a decrease in state support. Documentation provided by the BOV states that the policy of the state is to provide 67 percent of the cost of education of each Virginia resident. However, the document stated, “in 2010-11, the State will provide approximately 40 percent of this cost.”
To service the $1.1 billion budget that includes significant construction and expansion projects both in Blacksburg and beyond to areas such as Roanoke, Hampton and Wake Forest, in-state students living on campus can expect to see their overall costs rise from $14,599 in 2009-10 to $15,879 in 2010-11. Out-of-state students living on campus will foot a similar increase, as their costs will rise from $27,702 to $29,507.
Coming with the increased tuition is a rise in student fees, including an increased price for parking.
Student parking fees will now be set to $189 for the 2010-11 year, up from this year’s price of $136. Faculty parking fees will rise from $179 in 2009-10 to $220 in 2010-11. The student activity fee will see a $48 increase to $373 and the athletic fee will rise to $257, up from $232.
However, raising tuition is only one portion of the university’s answer to the current budget crisis and reduction of state funding.
Tech President Charles Steger gave a short report during the June 7 BOV meeting summarizing additional cost-saving efforts that utilized an “alternative severance option” with faculty and staff.
“We met our target reduction of well over 200 people taking the ASO,” Steger said.
A version of this article appeared in the Jun 10 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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Yet somehow we can still fund a 24 million dollar parking structure and the countless other building projects coming in the next 2 years instead of putting them on pause just for the sake of corporate "research". And of course athletic bonuses to the football coaches will stay the same or rise.
I'm all for laying off lazy or incompetent faculty tenure or not but there is a way to deal with hard economic times without slashing necessary or hard working faculty/staff and that's responsibly allocating money to priorities. Since I've been here at tech (5 years) educational quality does not really seem to be a top priority and as such will be affected by budget cuts while research won't.
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You don't seem to understand the different revenue streams that VT uses to operate. Parking, teaching, and research are completely different sources. If you tried to divert from on to the other, you'd be breaking state law.
The problem is the inadequate funding from Richmond. VT will get about 23% of it's teaching budget from Richmond. The rest is from tuition.
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Uh no. The parking structure is funded COMPLETELY from parking revenue (permits, tickets, etc.) and NOT from the state or university monies. Get your facts straight before you start rambling next time.
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"The more you subsidize something, the more you get of it."
That quote is from Ron Paul, the only politician who predicted the economic crises. He, along with economist Peter Schiff (who predicted the housing bust as early as 2003) point out that college costs will continue to go up as long as the federal government "helps" us go to school.
You see, colleges can charge us whatever they want because they know we will come. Why will we come? Because the federal government subsidizes loans for us to go to all these schools. If the feds stopped loaning us money, none of us could afford to go. This does not mean that colleges would close down. Instead, they would be forced to pay professors between 30-60k a year, instead of 70-120k a year. They would be forced to stop blowing all this money on sports teams and stadiums, and actually focus on educating us. They would be forced to stop blowing money on state-of-art new buildings, and just use buildings that are a few decades old (oh the horror). They would also be forced to stop building parking garages that cost tens of millions of dollars.
Sadly, Americans do not understand that federal "help" only makes the problems worse. So the Republicrats will continue to fund education and it will continue to get more expensive.
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Before the feds got involved in helping us pay for education, people actually paid their way through college. Before federally subsidized student loans, a person could go to law or medical school and graduate debt free, just by working summer jobs while in school.
- V
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That was because in those days tuition was maybe 1/5 of the cost it is now making possible to pay each semester tuition by working hours as a food worker ect. Today there's no way to do that. I had investments saved for college and still ran out of that, most of that was due to the economy but also tuition rising 10% a year over 4 or 5 years takes a significant toll as well.
I think the next big economic crisis will be education if things don't level out or fix themselves in the next 10 years or so. There's got to be a point where even with federal aid that debt becomes too large. Do you think $100,000 student debts will ever be the norm?
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Also you have question if the value of college will ever be less than the debt you take on. Someday the costs will outweigh the investment of college and it won't be an investment anymore. I debate whether the quality of education I'm getting here is worth the $14,000 I'm paying a year let alone the $20,000 out of state students are paying especially with a high prevalence of terrible professors in Engineering here. Sometimes I wish I could teach myself for free and take exams after exams to get my degree than deal with terrible professors that can delay your graduation or prevent it entirely. It's unfortunate that a lot of professors here are forced to teach classes when they don't want to and rather research and consequently education suffers.
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MIT Open Courseware
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
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Exactly, I used that when it first started a few years ago and still continue to at times as a supplement to my courses here. I also have a few good youtube subscriptions. There's so many resources out there for free! The only reason I'm throwing a fit is because tuition is increasing every year yet I find myself educating myself using a lot of those free resources on top of my lectures here because I HAVE to make up for a lot of sub par teaching.
MIT does a great job educating it's students WHILE still being one of the top research institutions in the world.
Why can't Virginia Tech find a fair balance between research and education? I support both but not one over the other except with the idea that I think undergraduate education should be more education focused meaning having qualified professors who actually desire to teach AND have the credentials. I think graduate school should be more researched based but it already is.
I'll give tech credit though, there are some great professors here like professor Chang in physics, yet he is the only good Physics/Engineering professor I know of. I think all professors (who want to teach) should model professor Chang's approach.
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When UC Berkeley announced its elimination of baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse teams and its defunding of the national-champion men’s rugby team, the chancellor sighed, “Sorry, but this was necessary!”
But was it? Yes, the university is in dire financial straits. Yet $3 million was somehow found to pay the Bain consulting firm to uncover waste and inefficiencies in UC Berkeley, despite the fact that a prominent East Coast university was doing the same thing without consultants.
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