Many aspiring college students take time each summer to visit different schools or to take part in orientation at the campus where they’ll study in the fall, but a much older group of visitors has been touring universities in Virginia.
Virginia Commonwealth University is less than a mile from the state capitol, but 22 members of the House Appropriations committee recently took a bus ride across campus to complete a statewide listening tour focused on higher education. Here’s committee vice chair Steve Landes.
“It hasn’t been done in probably ten or 15 years so it was helpful to kind of keep up - or catch up, if you will - on what has been occurring with the dollars we've been investing in institutions of higher learning and other facilities around the state.”
State spending for public universities dropped 22% between 1992 and 2012, and Jay Bonfili, VCU’s Interim VP for Finance, wanted lawmakers to see how bad things had gotten for students seeking degrees in science.
“We’re 12th in the nation in degrees awarded in chemistry, however we are in the lowest 10th percentile in lab space for chemistry, and it’s not just chemistry, it's all the STEM disciplines. Actually, courses have had to be canceled because of lack of space. You can’t cancel the future. That’s really what these asks are about is creating that next generation of scientists for the state.”
He also hoped to impress lawmakers with the need for a new allied health building where VCU could train pharmacists, surgical and radiology techs, nurses who administer anesthesia, physical therapists and so on.
“You know 90% of those students are employed in their field 6 months after graduation? And 75% of those students stay in the Commonwealth. That's an economic issue in and of itself.”
VCU gets a thousand applications a year for the physical therapy program but can only accommodate 54 students. Finally, the school said it needed state funding to expand its engineering program. Bonfili was encouraged by the lawmakers’ response.
“Yeah, they asked a lot of questions, but they were the right kind of question. They weren't 'I got ya' questions, they were probing, ‘I’m interested’ questions.”
But Steve Landes wasn’t making any promises.
“I hope that higher ed will be a priority - and, in fact, it looks like we have a little bit of a surplus - but we will see going into the 2016 session.”
Spending for higher ed in Virginia overall was up this year by 1.7% -- well below the national average of 5.2%.
