Financial Focus
BOV addresses tuition, maintenance spending
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Peggy Harrison |
| When news of Larry J. Sabato’s $1 million gift to the University was announced at the Feb. 4 board meeting, U.Va. President John T. Casteen III stood and applauded the popular politics professor (standing). For more on Sabato’s gift, which fulfilled a 30-year-old promise to then-President Edgar Shannon. |
By Dan Heuchert, Anne Bromley and Fariss Samarrai
While forecasting tuition for the next five years, U.Va.’s Board of Visitors — meeting Feb. 3 and 4 in the Rotunda — faced a choice between charging what the market will bear and paying for what is needed.
No vote will be taken until the March 24 meeting, but board members appeared to favor a more conservative pricing plan that ties tuition not exclusively to market value, but to the total cost of education. Such a plan could raise tuition by 9.95 percent in each of the next five years — or more, should the state not meet its funding commitments.
“Our goal isn’t to just charge what the market will bear without any accountability to how we expend the funds raised,” said Melody Bianchetto, the University’s budget director. “Our goal is to preserve the high-quality educational product that we currently offer while maintaining a diverse student enrollment. So we want to find the point at which our net price — the ‘sticker price’ after financial aid grants — doesn’t prevent students from attending, but generates sufficient revenue to maintain or improve the quality and high value of a U.Va. education.” Full story
Learning to govern - themselves and others
The undergraduate experience
The third in an occasional series
By Dan Heuchert
It’s a cold, rainy winter day and many students don’t feel like walking to class. Instead, they pack onto a University Transit Service bus — standing room only. Behind the wheel of the 35-foot-long, 13-ton, orange-and-blue behemoth: a fellow student.
In fact, UTS employs between 85 and 90 student drivers, who provide nearly 75 percent of its service hours, said Rebecca White, director of parking and transportation.
The University could hire all of its drivers from the local workforce, as many universities do. Instead, it gives students real responsibility — both for driving the buses, and often, for training and supervising the drivers. It’s all part of U.Va.’s commitment to student self-governance, said V. Shamim Sisson, senior associate dean of students. Full story
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