Students Flood Virginia Colleges
By Justin Bernick | August 29, 2001There's a growing tide of incoming students to Virginia's state colleges and universities. The problem is there's hardly enough room for them. At Old Dominion University, for example, a "large increase in the freshman class" required 24 students to live in a hotel in downtown Norfolk, and over 200 students to live in triples, ODU spokeswoman Jennifer Mullen said. Although over 19,000 students enrolled at ODU this year - a record increase from about 18,600 the year before - ODU was "able to accommodate everyone who requested on-grounds housing," she said. The story is the same at multiple colleges across the Commonwealth, including Virginia Tech and James Madison University, as administrators try to grapple with the problem of dramatically increasing enrollment coupled with shrinking state financial support. State legislators have begun to leave educators in the awkward position of adding new students without adding more money to their current budgets, which were frozen by the year's fiscal stalemate in the General Assembly. And according to future enrollment predictions, the problem is going to get worse.
