WELCOME AND WORDS FROM THE DEAN

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome back from your summer trips, vacations, workshops, and other time away from your work.  I suspect that you feel, much like I do, that each year is a new challenge, and so I know that you and your staff are making final plans and arrangements for the new academic year. 

The class of 2010 has the strongest academic credentials we have ever seen.  Eighty-eight percent of our incoming students rank in the top decile of their graduating class, with mean SAT scores two points higher than last year's.  We know that the quality of work they did in high school was exceptional, and we look forward to major accomplishments by these students.  The transfer class is also strong, with 528 students enrolling in our six undergraduate schools.  This was the first-year for our Guaranteed Admission Agreement with the Virginia Community College System, and we saw a marked increase in students enrolling from the Virginia community colleges

AccessUVA continues to grow and develop as a wonderful financial aid program.  Through AccessUVA, the University will meet 100% of demonstrated need, cap the amount of need-based loans offered to any student, and will provide low-income students a full-grant financial aid package.  Students classified as low income (and our definition of this is a student who comes from a family of four that makes less than $37,700 per year) will receive a full-grant package that eliminates the need for loans and work-study during their four years at UVa.  All other students that qualify for aid will have packages that combine grant, loans, and work-study, but they will graduate with no more than $19,000 in loans.   We are very concerned with reducing the number of loans that students accrue, for we know that indebtedness can keep students from considering graduate schools and some professions. 

Our new Admission Office website has launched and we hope that your students will enjoy navigating it (www.virginia.edu/undergradadmission).  We think it is considerably more user-friendly, detailed, and descriptive than our previous one, and I’d appreciate any reactions you or your students have to it.                                                                          

Finally, I want to thank you for the letters of recommendation you have sent to us over the years.  Please know that they are an important part of our holistic evaluation of credentials because they add human qualities to the application which we might not have seen otherwise. 

Best wishes for a great year.

Sincerely,

John A. Blackburn
Dean of Admission