SARA SPANGER/COLLEGIATE TIMES
The alternative severance option essentially allows the university to lay off staff and non-tenured instructors and faculty. It also offers tenured faculty the option of voluntarily giving up their tenure so that their employment can be terminated in the same manner as staff.
Alternative severance can be helpful to staff or faculty who were considering retiring in the near future, as it can help increase their pension payments under the Virginia state retirement system.
Tech began examining the option of cutting faculty and staff positions as a cost-saving method in October when Steger sent a university-wide memo stating that senior resource managers would begin investigating alternate severance options for the upcoming months.
At that time, many in the university felt that cutting faculty and staff positions was the next logical step, as more than $60 million in state funding had been cut since 2007 and many departments had already taken extreme cost-cutting measures outside of examining faculty and staff positions.
However, cutting 200 faculty and staff positions is sure to have some type of impact on the students paying 11 percent more to attend Tech in the coming school year.
Gary Long, the faculty senate representative to the BOV, expressed his constituents’ disappointment in the university’s use of the alternative severance option.
Long said in his report to the BOV that he was aware of at least 70 teaching faculty positions that had been cut.
Steger conceded during his brief statement to the BOV that cutting that many faculty and staff positions would strain university operations.
“It puts more pressure on the rest of the organization and affects your service level,” he said.
However, university spokesman Mark Owczarski said after the meeting that the tuition increase would help to reduce adverse effects on that service level.
“We have to increase tuition to maintain our level of quality,” he said.
Owczarski said he expected the increased tuition levels to lead to “significantly increasing” financial aid to students.
BOV documentation indicated “undergraduate student financial aid will increase by $1.2 million in fiscal year 2011.”
“To help those who will be affected by the increase,” Owczarski said. “The two go hand in hand.”
He stressed the importance of private donations to the university, as did members of the BOV during Monday’s meeting.
“If state support drops, we need some kind of financial support,” Owczarski said.
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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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