Virginia colleges are bracing for potentially significant state budget cuts

With Virginia facing a $1.5 billion budget shortfall, the commonwealth’s public colleges and universities are looking for ways to offset a potentially significant loss of state funding with the goal of not having to raise tuition and fees for students next fall.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s chief of staff Paul Reagan recently sent a letter asking school officials to prepare for a 7.5 percent decrease in appropriations from the state’s general fund in the fiscal year that begins July 1. Reagan urged college presidents and chancellors to “make a concerted effort to identify real, ongoing efficiencies and related savings,” rather than forcing families to shoulder more of the financial burden.

“Tuition and fee increases beyond what was already being proposed in an institutions’s six-year plan should not be considered as a mechanism to offset these reductions,” Reagan wrote in the letter, which was first reported by the Roanoke Times.

State policy decisions have contributed to a monumental shift in the way Virginia’s public colleges are funded in just the past two decades. Tuition made up less than a third of total education revenue at state schools in 1989, and by 2014, those dollars accounted for 62 percent of the money schools needed to educate students, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/11/08/virginia-colleges-are-bracing-for-potentially-significant-state-budget-cuts/