<p>I’m a senior at an OOS private high school who has been accepted to UVA, and I was hoping for a few current students to weigh in about their experiences at UVA in the context of UVA’s being a public school.</p>
<p>1) I don’t know how Virginia’s state budget is now, but if it’s anything like my state’s, then I would imagine Virginia is in trouble. Has this had any effect on opportunities or resources you use/may have used if budget issues weren’t a concern?</p>
<p>2) Is bureaucracy a problem at UVA? For academics/graduation requirements, funding, extracurriculars, anything?</p>
<p>3) On a slightly different note, what are the relationships between OOS and IS students? I guess this ties in to UVA b/c of the stricter admission policies as a public school, but I’m still curious if self-segregation, etc. exists.</p>
<p>Any answers you could provide, or any related, constructive advice you could offer would be much appreciated!</p>
<p>1) The major universities of Virginia are notoriously underfunded by the state. However, a great deal of money still comes from private donors, and the university itself is humming along quite well. There have been cutbacks and freezes on pay raises, like many universities nowadays (public and private). Unlike many other universities, however, UVA did not start initiating construction until they had organized all of the funds needed, and thus many construction projects are still going on at a rapid pace. Overall, the cutbacks are not altogether noticeable.</p>
<p>2) I have not had a problem with bureaucracy at all at UVA. Most of the people you meet who work here are quite nice, and studying abroad is quite easy to do, even as a first year. Some departments are bigger than others, but so far I have not had major problems with bureaucracy. </p>
<p>3) Relations between OOS and IS students are quite normal. You will meet quite a few OOS students if you come here, both from public and private high schools. Quite frankly, OOS students generally have a reputation of being smarter than the average ISer, since everyone knows the standards for admission were higher.</p>
<p>For quite a number of years, UVA has only received about 8% of its total budget from the state, though the money it does get is valuable because it is un-earmarked and can be used for basic operating expenses. In a recession in the early 1990s, when state funding fell sharply, the upper administration realized that the university could not rely on that source alone and started bolstering the endowment in a big way, with two giant fundraising campaigns. As a result UVA is now a semi-public, semi-private institution, and is better situated than many other state schools, esp. those in California. At the same time, when the stock market tumbled the size of UVA’s endowment tumbled too, so there have necessarily been some cuts. There’s been a two-year hiring freeze, and faculty and staff salaries have been frozen at 2007 levels. There have not been firings or furloughs so far. </p>
<p>Departments have been trying very hard to minimize the effect of budget cuts on instruction. For instance, the English Dept, where I teach, has saved a lot of money on office supplies by switching aggressively to email for all departmental correspondence, lecture advertisements, and so on. Other departments have made other cuts depending on their priorities; for instance, the Music Dept. cut out the department contribution to professional travel expenses for faculty, and trimmed the budget for visiting artists and lecturers. Arguably these cuts make the educational environment less rich but I doubt many undergraduate students notice a huge change.</p>
<p>Universities public and private are having similar issues; the public schools are getting less tax revenue, while the privates have to deal with shrunken endowments. I suspect that super-rich schools, like HYP, have more fat to cut than UVA or other state schools have but on the other hand, I gather from what I read that there investment strategies were more exotic and riskier so they may have suffered greater losses.</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone for the informative responses. I’m glad to hear the more-or-less good news, that the UG experience isn’t affected too badly by budget cuts, and I’ll keep that in mind over the next few weeks.</p>
<p>You really need to look at the budget outside the UVa Hospitals operations as that is a large separate break-even operation having little to do with the academic side. The state support is still small at around 11.5% of the total University budget. State support is becoming very limited and soon might not matter much at all. But right now it still pays for lots of salaries.</p>