Report: U-Va Should Be a Private University

northwesty
Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:47:51 +0000

Of course Sullivan is for this. She, like every university president in history, wants more money. She’s in favor of more money from students, more money from the state, more money from donors. And less restrictions too. Her top priority is to raise faculty salaries after all.

Kinda like those T-mobile commercials with the little kids. What’s better – more or less? More!!! I suspect the real agenda here is to shake more money out of the state.

And she did come from UM, which (as compared to UVA) has more OOS students, more state funding, and higher tuition rates. The Dragas crew, not Sullivan, seemed to be the ones interested in exploring how to do things in a way where the solution was something other than just more money.

But the concern about a possible slide (not just for UVA) is valid as state money keeps going down. If there’s less state money, having less state strings has some logic to it. UNC has more strings than UVA but also gets much more state funding.

FYI, the UVA law school’s rankings have gone up slightly since it became “financially self-sufficient.” Tied for #7 this year with Penn. Behind NYU, but ahead of Michigan and Berkeley (both also private financially now). Also ahead of Duke, Georgetown, Cornell and Northwestern. That exercise was more about maintaining the ratings rather than increasing them them. Seems to have worked well, although the tuition is eye popping. 51k OOS, 46k IS. That’s just tuition.