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A study by the New America Foundation recently found that only 13 percent of U.Va.’s students qualify for Pell Grants, federal scholarships for poor students. By comparison, approximately 37 percent of undergraduates at the University of California Berkeley are Pell-eligible. The cuts to need-based aid will further reduce the number, ensuring that U.Va. will continue to be — in the study’s words — “one of the least socioeconomically diverse public colleges in the country.”
But the damage is not limited to disadvantaged students. Those who can afford high tuitions will be deprived of the opportunity to live and learn from students of different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. Ultimately the commonwealth will suffer by failing to develop the full potential of its qualified young people.
If the trend toward de facto privatization continues, the university will achieve a dubious goal often mouthed by U.Va. undergraduates of my generation — to become the Princeton of the South. With state appropriations stagnant, tuition skyrocketing and need-based aid declining, U.Va. is perilously close to replicating the Princeton model by creating an enclave for daughters and sons of high-income families.
Some might cheer gentrification as fulfillment of the university’s destiny, but before U.Va. unquestioningly pursues such a strategy, the state should carefully debate the issue. It might be instructive to recall what Princeton President (and Virginian) Woodrow Wilson sadly concluded as he surveyed his university’s student body in 1910: “The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning,” Wilson warned, “but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them.”
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shaun james bockert 