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In a rare fair-weather story, the Virginia General Assembly’s budget plan will not make any new cuts to higher education. But the plan comes at a price: out-of-state students will be charged extra to help compensate for the state's lack of funding for higher education.
 
The 2010-2012 budget has increased out-of-state student fees from $10 per credit hour to $15 per credit hour, which will cost the average out-of-state student between $150 and $175 per year. The result is a budget that even avoids faculty furlough days.
 
A Virginia Tech press release reported that the General Assembly considered extending the increased fee to in-state students, but ultimately decided against it.
 
According to Kristen Nelson, a spokeswoman for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the government does not expect the increase alone to significantly affect the out-of-state students' demand for a college education in Virginia. Those students already pay two to three times more than in-state students for tuition and fees, she said.
 
More than 25 percent of Virginia Tech’s undergraduate class is made up of out-of-state students. As of fall 2009, those students’ fees totaled more than $10,000, compared to the $5,000 total for in-state students.
 
SCHEV statistics from fall 2009 show that 11.1 percent of undergraduates at Virginia public schools were from out of state, a proportion that has increased to 14.9 percent in the most recent class of freshmen.
 
“I would suspect that given the amount of tuition they are already willing to pay to go to an out-of-state institution in Virginia, an extra $150 a year might prove negligible,” Nelson said.
 
However, Nelson conceded that combined with this increase, overall rising expenses could negatively affect out-of-state enrollment.
 
“If there are a number of these types of things — say you increase base tuition, you increase room and board and you increase this — it could get to the breaking point,” Nelson said. “It could get to the point where it may discourage some students from applying to Virginia schools as out-of-state students.”

More from the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech