College students can feel belt-tightening

When her landscaping business withered with the economy around it, LeeAnne Brooks did what an increasing number of Virginians are doing. She went back to school.

At 49, Brooks is acutely aware that she's anything but a typical college student as she takes her seat beside 20-year-olds at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.

But like the generation behind her, she is concerned about how proposed state budget reductions will affect the education she needs to become a teacher.

With the state facing a revenue shortfall of $3.2 billion, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said he could no longer spare education from budget cuts.

His plan to reduce higher-education spending by $296 million has college presidents predicting dire consequences:

Smith said she lost a campus job in October because of budget cuts. She recently found a new job, but it doesn't pay as much and that's making it harder for her to make tuition payments.

Kutner doesn't think he'll graduate on time. By the time he registered for classes, the required courses he needed were full.

"They had nothing," he said.

Virginia's higher-education system is at the tipping point with ramifications that extend far beyond the campus, said Daniel LaVista, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

"The public and private benefits that we accrue from higher education are under siege," he said.

Brooks did her part to take that message to the General Assembly. Grateful for a scholarship from J. Sargeant Reynolds, she spent Wednesday morning meeting with state legislators in hopes they could "put a face on the problem."

Sean O'Brien, a University of Mary Washington senior who is president of the Student Government Association, made a similar trip to the General Assembly the week before.

The cuts and resulting tuition increases will make school either "less affordable or less high quality," he said. "There's no real way around that."

. . .

In his State of the Commonwealth address on Jan. 14, Kaine said he has had to "propose difficult cuts" in higher education but has been "constantly mindful of the effect of higher tuition costs on Virginia families."

Boards of visitors will set tuition this spring based on what the General Assembly does with the state budget. Not all schools anticipate increases as steep as 10 percent, but even small ones can add to student debt.

Benjamin Byrnes, a junior from Lynchburg, said he is still scrambling to make up last year's increase at Longwood University.

Byrnes, who serves on Longwood's financial-aid student advisory committee, said students "understand that tuition is going up. We've accepted the trend that it's always going up."

But he thinks the full impact doesn't hit them until they start paying back their loans.

By the time he graduates, he expects to owe $28,000.

"You're paying almost the equivalent of a mortgage payment in student loans," he said.

. . .

U.Va. President John T. Casteen recently told members of the Senate Finance Committee that he expected to see a tuition increase of just under 10 percent. Each 1 percent increase in tuition would bring the university an additional $1 million.

Talk of tuition increases is a sensitive subject, especially when the talk is of percentages.

"Percentages are not all equal," Glenn DuBois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, told committee members.

He said that while the system could see an increase nearing 10 percent, it would not generate as much revenue because community college tuition is about one-third the average cost of four-year public schools.

At the same meeting, James Madison University President Linwood H. Rose said JMU is looking at a tuition increase to recoup about one-half of the state reduction. The university is considering a 6 percent increase now but may need to go higher, he said.

While other businesses deal with economic troubles by cutting production as demand slows, universities can't do that, Rose said.

"Our demand is ever present," he said. "Our demand is growing."

His comments were underscored last week by reports from admissions deans of a surge in applications for fall. William and Mary, for example, said applications for a freshman class of about 1,380 spots surpassed 12,000 for the first time in the college's history.

Schools will have a harder time accommodating increasing demand.

"We've got to lower expectations," said George Mason University President Alan G. Merten at a policy meeting at SCHEV that included a discussion about alerting high school counselors to this reality.

"Not only are we not going to grow, we're going to get smaller," he said.

Merten said GMU has grown by 8,000 students over the past 10 years to nearly 31,000. The university had projected increasing its size to about 37,000 students, but those plans have been shelved because of loss of state funding.

"We've effectively stopped growing," Merten said. Any increase in numbers now is primarily attributable to better retention of students.

A tuition increase nearing 10 percent could be possible at GMU, Merten said, adding, "Let's stop talking percentages. They scare people."

A 10 percent increase would cost students about $750, he said. But he never hears complaints about tuition increases -- the complaints he hears primarily concern students who did not get admitted.

"There's a message there," he said.

. . .

Even without the budget cuts, Virginia Commonwealth University was not planning further growth, said Thomas Rosenthal, rector of the state's largest public university.

"There's not a lot of desire to either shrink it or grow it," he said. But the board of visitors will face "a fine balancing act" when it looks at tuition because of VCU's desire to remain a university of opportunity for students of diverse backgrounds and income levels.

"The board is very concerned about the financial impact on our students," he said. "We have a very vulnerable population."

John R. Broderick, acting president of Old Dominion University, shares similar concerns. Many of ODU's freshmen work 20 hours a week, but the school has had to scuttle plans to offer more on-campus jobs that would work better with their schedules.

"Our challenges are pretty significant," he said. "We've grown during a time when state resources have not followed."

. . .

School presidents have been keeping a high profile at the assembly in the past few weeks as they attempt to negotiate a softer blow to their budgets. But the lines of people lobbying state legislators are long because the proposed cuts reach a broad swath of state services, including health and public safety.

"We're here to remind you that we're part of the solution to the economy," J. Sargeant Reynolds President Gary L. Rhodes told legislators as he made the rounds with a group of students that included LeeAnne Brooks.

In his plea for budget leniency, Rhodes told them that the college's enrollment is at an all-time high. But unlike four-year schools, the community colleges do not cap enrollment.

One of those new students is Brooks, who returned to school last semester and hopes to transfer to a four-year school next year.

A Sandston resident, Brooks had spent 20 years in the airline industry before studying landscape design through the University of Richmond and attempting to start her own business.

Now, she's working two part-time jobs while taking a full course load at J. Sarge and is determined to get her degree.

"This time, I'm in it for the long haul," she said. "So much for me is riding on this."

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or .