Price war
By Staff
A few days before graduating its largest class in history, George Mason University announced that tuition and fees will jump nearly 10 percent next year. That translates to $7,512 a year for in-state students and a whopping $21,648 for those who don't reside in Virginia.
The news wasn't any better at Virginia Tech, where tuition and fees will rise by nearly 11 percent during the 2008-09 academic year. The University of Virginia is bumping costs up by 9 percent for in-state students.
For those keeping score, the average cost of a four-year education in Virginia has more than doubled in the past decade.
Officials at all three schools say the increases are necessary because of state budget cuts.
While we understand the need to tighten belts in soft economic times, shifting the entire financial burden of a college education from the state to the students seems a tad unfair and more than a little unwise.
Given last week's announcements, it's fair to say Virginia schools are pricing students from low- and middle-income families out of college at a time when education is an increasingly important ticket to good jobs. The fact that the pool of scholarship money is also shrinking only compounds the problem.
Equally troubling is the potential impact on Hispanics and other minority students in highly diverse Fairfax County. If even a small percentage of those students start to believe that getting a high school degree is a waste of time because they can't afford a public four-year college anyway, there will likely be ripple effects all the way down to the middle school classrooms.
It's still a bit early to call this a crisis, but university presidents and state lawmakers need to hatch a plan that doesn't put the family of every college-bound student in a state of financial disrepair.
If they don't, higher education in Virginia will have gone from being a good deal to a cautionary tale.