roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

There's a student enrollment explosion on the horizon for Virginia's two- and four-year colleges and universities at the same time the state is cutting the flow of funds for higher education.

But there's one institution in Virginia that's put its thinking cap on and has come up with a creative -- and apparently cost-effective -- way to help address this seemingly incongruous situation. It's Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

Since 1987, there's been an increase of about 60,000 students (straight headcount, not the full-time equivalency) in our community colleges and four-year institutions, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the state's coordinating policy body for our system of public colleges and universities. More than half of this increase, amazingly, has come in just the last handful of years.

And this head-spinning growth is to continue for the foreseeable future. During the first decade of this new century -- we're already a third through it -- SHCEV predicts Virginia's four-year schools to grow by about 19,000 students, or 11 percent; the two-year colleges will grow by about 13,000 or students, or 9 percent. That's a total of 32,000 new students by 2010.

On the money side of things, remember that while the state made record investments in higher education over the past five years -- about $460 million in new funds -- budget-writers have whacked more than $300 million from our institutions over the past six or so months to help balance the state's books.

So let's repeat the opening paragraph: there's an enrollment explosion on the horizon for Virginia's two- and four-year colleges and universities at the same time the state is cutting the flow of funds for higher education.

Lots of legislators and policy wonks are turning something of a blind eye to this brewing storm, presumably thinking it'll blow over or somehow take care of itself. And some college and university presidents have flat-out declined to take on more students without more state funding for fear of compromising their standards of educational quality, not an entirely unreasonable position.

So it's quite refreshing when, out of the blue, somebody steps up with a plan to tackle a problem so many seem to be playing down and even ignoring.

Roseann Runte, ODU's president for the past two years, popped up last week with this proposal to the state: for $20 million more over the next five years, her university would commit to enrolling 10,000 to 12,000 additional students.

ODU would do this, Runte explained, by turning its summer school into a regular semester, thereby making her university a year-round institution; making better, smarter, and more comprehensive use of its satellite campuses around the state; working more collaboratively with community colleges, possibly sharing facilities; and creating "e-Dominion University," where ODU would house on its own servers all state universities' distance-learning programs, an area where ODU already is the acknowledged leader.

Apparently, ODU's faculty and students are on board with Runte's plan. Additional faculty would help ease the arguably heavy teaching burden many faculty are now under, not to mention the crowded classes, and the students could graduate earlier.

Assuming a student's full-time curriculum for a four-year degree today stretches across eight semesters, under ODU's proposed year-round plan, a student could graduate -- at least in theory -- in just under three years.

The university currently has more than 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students who are taught by a full-time faculty of 600 and about half as many adjuncts. There's a full-time equivalent of 14,000 people on its payroll. Last year, ODU raked in more than $32 million in research grants, a figure that's been growing by more than 10 percent a year.

It's easy to see why Hampton Roads business and civic leaders see ODU as unquestionably integral to sustaining the region's growth and boosting its economy.

It's also interesting that it's a French scholar and accomplished poet whose writings are translated into everything from Chinese to Rumanian who runs a university that's so widely known for its science and engineering programs. Runte's is an institution, for example, whose physicists collaborate on the world's most powerful free electron laser; which has the world's largest university-owned wind tunnel; and which has one of only three doctoral programs nationwide in engineering modeling and simulation. That's right, a French scholar and poet.

So it's not surprising that it was Runte -- creative by nature, inventive by necessity -- who raised her hand last week and made the state an offer that must be seriously considered. For an additional $20 million, made payable between now and the end of the decade, Runte's willing to take about half of the nearly 20,000 new baccalaureate students who, she says, if absorbed into the system traditionally, would cost the state upwards of $75 million.

Runte's a Canadian who's been in Virginia but two years. She's overseen the completion of ODU's new $40 million convocation center (part of a $260 million "university village" project) and is now watching a new $19 million engineering building go up, and she recently announced a $32 million gift to the university, its largest ever.

Here's to hoping legislators and policymakers will listen carefully when this soft-spoken president calls to chat about her plans for higher education in the Old Dominion.

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