<p>is Albo the same guy who had a wealthy supporter’s son not get into UVA a couple years ago and made a big stink? (edit: is this actually the same supporter’s son?)</p>
<p>Virginia, year after year, continually cuts the support it provides to its top schools. Virginia reaps the benefit in this, as many graduates stay in the area (many graduates of both UVA and W&M can be found in Richmond and on the VA side of the DC suburbs). These are well educated people who now pay taxes to the state (err, commonwealth). Everyone benefits from well educated people paying taxes.</p>
<p>You cannot cut and cut and cut and then announce a small increase and mandate that these schools take more in state students. There is absolutely nothing wrong with degrees from Virginia Tech or JMU or Mary Washington… these schools would be the best public schools in many other states.</p>
<p>Increasing the number of Virginians with degrees is an excellent goal. But you don’t get there by mandating the best schools take more Virginians. Do you really think that kid from the article with 1300 SATs and a 3.99 is not going to get a college degree now b/c he didn’t get into UVA? Exactly. The way to get more Virginians college degrees is to increase enrollment at schools like VCU, ODU, GMU, and Radford, and possibly open up another similar level school.</p>
<p>Really though, my opinion is that we do not need more people with college degrees. Too many people get college degrees already. There was just that study in the last couple weeks (someone else has seen this, i’m sure) that said a lot of students aren’t getting better at fundamental skills while they are in college. This is because too many people are attending.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that everyone who wants to go to a certain top school is not going to get in. College admissions is [partially] a crap shoot. Top schools can replace large percentages of their accepted students with people they rejected (or WL) and you wouldn’t even know the difference.</p>
<p>McDonnell seems to be against residency caps etc, so that is good.</p>