President’s Update: 2013-14 budget proposal update
The VCU Board of Visitors soon will adopt a budget for the coming year. The 2013-14 budget plan may include a tuition increase, a change in the tuition cost structure for new students - freshmen and transfers - and significant measures to reduce expenditures and reallocate savings to the core academic mission.
Despite recent reversals in the trend to cut state funding for higher education, VCU still suffers the impact of the largest reduction of state support in its history. While VCU continues to cut costs and create efficiencies, the university can go only so far before the foundation we’ve built toward becoming a nationally competitive university erodes.
The proposed measures have been carefully considered. We believe they are necessary to provide students with a national-caliber educational experience at VCU that is consistent with a premier urban, public research university.
Here are some of the details and reasons behind these recommendations to the board.
Challenging financial situation
VCU’s funding situation is unique in the commonwealth. We share a position among the state’s Tier 3 universities - the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and the College of William & Mary. We are proud to serve the largest in-state student population. However, that distinction means VCU does not have the buffer of higher out-of-state tuition revenues provided to our peer institutions.
Additionally, despite our status as a national research university, our tuition is the lowest of our peers and ranks roughly in the middle of the state’s four-year institutions. VCU’s historically low tuition rates are remarkable given our economic challenges. Even with increases in state funding this year and last, for which we are grateful, state support remains nearly $52 million below 2008 levels.
There are budget challenges beyond tuition. For example, VCU faces $18 million in new, unavoidable costs next fiscal year - which are defined as costs that VCU must incur for contractual or legal reasons. A significant portion of the unavoidable costs is because of very modest and well-deserved faculty and staff raises, the first in five years. While the state requires the raises, it does not fully cover the cost, and VCU must fund the remainder. Other unavoidable costs include state employee health care premiums, retirement benefit increases and utility cost escalation. In total, new state appropriations will cover only about half of these unavoidable costs.
Without a tuition increase and some new, market-based tuition strategies, there will be little that VCU can do to move forward with academic priorities beyond meeting those unavoidable costs.
Revenue generation to support quality education
VCU’s budget priorities reflect Quest for Distinction strategic plan priorities for a quality education: faculty recruitment and retention, student scholarships, financial aid and support services, and academic and research spaces.
VCU is pursuing all reasonable sources of revenue. Fundraising is a top priority for my senior team and me. Improving the return on our investments and cash management is another. New entrepreneurial initiatives also are underway.
However, the stark reality of 2013 is that tuition and fees are the major revenue source for instruction in public universities. The state no longer is able to subsidize higher education as it has in the past. We recently undertook an in-depth study of tuition strategies, getting input from hundreds of students who participated in surveys, focus groups and, most recently, meetings with the university’s chief academic and operating officers.
Several options were dismissed based on student feedback. While no one wants a tuition increase, other options seemed to be more palatable and will be presented to the board for consideration:
- For all students - a proposed 4.19 percent increase (or $414) in tuition and mandatory fees. Even with these new rates, VCU would remain in the middle of the state’s universities in terms of a tuition increase and 2013-14 tuition and fees.
- For new students - freshmen and transfer students - a proposed per-credit-hour pricing structure based on the 2013-14 rates for the first 14 credits taken with additional credits at 15 hours and more discounted by 50 percent from the 2013-14 rate.
- For returning students - continue with the current “block” pricing structure, paying one price for a block of 12 to 18 credits, with overload pricing for 19 or more credit hours.
Current students are able to take 13-18 credit hours without any additional charge, which means VCU subsidizes those credits above the full-time level of 12 credit hours. Unfortunately, following years of reductions resulting in the largest loss of state appropriations in the university’s history, VCU no longer can support a strong academic mission with subsidized tuition. Per-credit pricing is a market-based, pay-for-what-you-consume tuition strategy that generates additional revenue and enables the university to better manage course sections, faculty assignments and classroom availability.
The tuition increase must be coupled with ongoing cost-cutting and operational efficiencies where appropriate, with those savings directed to the core academic mission.
Next Steps
The VCU Board of Visitors will make a decision on tuition and fees at its May 10 meeting. This decision comes following months of thoughtful examination, and we are grateful for every member’s diligence in advocating for students, faculty and staff.
The work of a great university is about shaping the future of society. It is primarily an investment in people — in students, faculty and staff.
Your hard work and commitment is why VCU’s reputation is rising so quickly across the country and around the world. This must be combined with a strong foundation of investment in faculty, student success and spaces to solidify VCU’s position as a nationally competitive public research university. I am committed to ensuring that every student’s degree will be competitive anywhere in the world.
I wish you well as this academic year draws to an end and thank you for your essential contributions in making VCU the great university it is today.
Questions about the budget or tuition?
Visit: http://www.mytuition.vcu.edu/ and http://www.budgetupdate.vcu.edu/
![[An interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Bryant Mangum]
Bryant Mangum, professor of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU, released his latest book, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press), in March. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context is a collection of essays that highlights how the works of Fitzgerald depict the Zeitgeist of the 1920s and 1930s.
Will you describe the process involved in editing F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context?
When the acquisitions editor at Cambridge University Press approached me about editing the volume, I wrote an 80-page proposal in which I detailed the contexts that would be explored in the individual chapters. The proposal went out to three anonymous readers chosen by Cambridge, each of whom endorsed the project. Once the project was accepted, I began to think about contributors, and came to the conclusion that the volume would have strong representation from the group of Fitzgerald scholars who have been working in the field for many years, but that the work of these scholars should be balanced as evenly as possible by the ideas of emerging scholars. I created a list of scholars, and contacted each of them individually. To my good fortune, virtually all of them agreed to write a chapter. Almost a year later, I received chapters from forty individual scholars. I performed substantive edits on each of them, and then copy-edited them, and then finally proofread them. Each chapter went through at least three editorial “passes” before the process was complete. In addition to the aforementioned editorial processes, I wrote the preface to the volume and two of the chapters. I also located and garnered permissions for ten photographs as well as created the index.
This book covers many contexts related to the 1920s and 1930s ranging from prohibition to the postwar flapper. How are these contexts relevant to Fitzgerald’s work?
These contexts in the book are relevant to Fitzgerald’s work because Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age and chronicled two of the most exciting, complex and turbulent eras in American history: the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. For example, he wrote extensively about the burgeoning youth culture of the 1920s as well as the gender norms and fashions of the period. With regard to the 1930s, he wrote a novel as well as numerous stories that reflect the ways in which the producers and writers of the Golden Age of Hollywood conducted their personal and professional lives. Ultimately, Fitzgerald has become virtually inseparable from the culture in which he lived and of which he wrote.
You have written a book on Fitzgerald and edited a collection of Fitzgerald’s stories for the Modern Library. What sparked your interest in Fitzgerald?
One critic has remarked that “Fitzgerald had a style that was impossible to imitate but from which much could be learned.” I admire those qualities of his style that are impossible to imitate and, in fact, nearly impossible to name or define but which are in evidence in virtually everything he wrote. As Dorothy Parker once said, “Fitzgerald could write a bad story, but he could not write badly.” I take this to mean, in part, that his writing has a beautiful lyricism that qualifies as “prose genius.” Part of that genius reflects what Fitzgerald himself defined (though not in direct reference to himself) as the test of a first-rate intelligence: the ability to hold two ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Fitzgerald’s insights into the human condition and his lyrical prose sparked my interest in his life and works, and they are two of the primary reasons that I, among many others, consider him one of the greatest writers of the Modernist period.
Who do you consider to be the audience for F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context?
The book is designed as a resource for Fitzgerald scholars, as well as for instructors and graduate or advanced undergraduate students conducting research on Fitzgerald and/or the literature and culture of the Jazz Age and Depression eras.
Are you considering any other book projects?
I am currently putting together an edition of short stories of The New Yorker writer Alice Adams. The stories in the volume are all set in Chapel Hill, N.C., a setting referred to as Hilton in many of her works. I am in the process of acquiring permissions to reprint her works.
Read More: http://ow.ly/kEaNZ](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7f4f1de7a697d77a66f5cbf03f6f4d3b/tumblr_mm6khvU3lr1qgyboto1_500.png)
Reblogged from ![[This message is Rodney the Ram approved]
The VCU da Vinci Center held their second Venture Creation Competition last week during VCU’s Research Week. The goal of the competition is to spark innovation and entrepreneurship amongst VCU students.
Team FreeMobility won the undergraduate division with their design for a stair-climbing walker intended for the elderly and those in physical therapy to gain a greater sense of freedom and independence.
Team SKRIBS won the graduate division with erasable, customizable wristbands that allow kids to write and draw whatever they like with whatever they like. Read More: http://ow.ly/kBsM6](http://24.media.tumblr.com/26d214e2baae63c4e07c7d9637fafe92/tumblr_mm4hzpPPcA1qgyboto1_500.jpg)
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