NOVA Begins Year Bigger And Better Than Ever

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(Thursday) August 26, 2010

By James Cullum
alexandrianews.org

Northern Virginia Community College is consistently ranked among the nation’s top community college systems. Recently, the weak economy and NOVA’s relationship with Virginia’s top universities has proved beneficial to the school.

During the 2009-2010 school year, there were 72,265 students, an 8% increase over the previous year. The cost per credit hour for Virginia residents is $112.45 and is $297.20 for non-residents. NOVA operates six campuses, three satellite academic centers and an Extended Learning Institute for residents living in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William Counties and the cities of Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax, Manassas Park and Manassas.

The college was recently named a Leader College by nonprofit Achieving The Dream for “demonstrating sustained improvement and accomplishments” in student advancement.  For four of the last five years, a NOVA student has been awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship, which pays up to $30,000 a year to complete an undergraduate degree.  NOVA received national attention in March when President Barack Obama signed the Health Care and Reconciliation Act of 2010 at the Alexandria campus.

The graduation rate at NOVA has increased by about 30% since the 2005-2006 school year. In May, 3978 NOVA students received their Associate Degrees, compared to 2928 in 2006. Annual retention rates rose from 44% in 2004 to 46.3% in fall 2009. Forty percent of the student population is 21 years old or younger; 30% is between 22 and 29 years old; 24% is 30 to 59 years old and 1.61% is 60 years or older.

NOVA has recently negotiated a guaranteed admission agreement with 28 schools. Those colleges include Catholic University, Christopher Newport University, The University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, James Madison University, the College of William and Mary and Georgetown University. This agreement, and NOVA’s affordability have made it an attractive choice for a variety of students.

The guaranteed admission agreement was enough for Kristopher Armradit to enroll. Armradit, 18, recently graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington. “I have enough AP credits to graduate from NOVA in one year. So, with their guaranteed admission agreement, I’m going to try to finish in one year and transfer into the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech or Georgetown,” he said. “I had bad grades in high school, but good test scores. I applied to a lot of different colleges, but I didn’t get accepted into any college I wanted. So, I decided to come here because it’s close, it’s cheap and they’re well connected.”

Armradit is taking 16 credit hours at the Alexandria campus and is paying $2000 in tuition and close to $700 for books this semester. “I’m going to like it. A lot of high school is directed to controlling your day and regimenting everything, but in college you make your own decisions and have a lot of responsibility with nobody to clean up after you,” he said. “When you come here the first day there is a checklist. You sit down in a room with a counselor and they help you pick all of your classes with your major in mind. If you want additional advice you can just walk into the counseling office. It’s pretty efficient.”

Heidi Chapman, 41, has attended NOVA’s Alexandria campus for eight years, and, upon graduation, will take advantage of the guaranteed admissions agreement. “I’ve been at NOVA since 2002, going part-time. I’ll be finished at the end of this year. I definitely think the quality of the education is top notch. I’m very picky about my teachers. I always go to ratemyprofessors.com and check out the teachers before my class,” she said. “Actually, I’ll be enrolling at the University of Virginia’s Bachelor’s program and it will take me two years to get a Bachelor’s of Science. I’ll be taking the classes at night, and with The University of Virginia program, the classes are here, so I’ll actually be here with the same people.”

Chapman is a meeting planner. “Even though I was going to school part time and working full time, I was still very interested in school activities. After the spring of my second year, I joined Phi Beta Kappa, which is the national honors society for community colleges,” she said. “We have a very active campus here. It’s very easy to start a club here if you feel like you’re interested in something. It’s a very supportive environment for students. There’s lots of people here that care about you. This semester I’m applying for a scholarship and the process will include me working with two or three professors who are going to work with me on my application. And it’s a very intense process, but it’s unusual for people to devote that much time to make that person succeed.”

Chapman helped found the campus’ women’s center and is now involved in Virginia 21, a statewide group that is working to get a grant funded through the State Legislature to allow anyone with a 3.0 GPA who graduates from a community college to transfer to a four-year university or college.

For years, this has been Chapman’s routine. “I’d work all day, get to class about three minutes before it began, and, if I had a sandwich, it was probably something that I had from lunch in the car on the way. Some people have said I’m erratic because I’ll take a class that I really need to have, but also take one that I really want to take. But, overall, I think that I’ve gotten more out of this school for becoming more involved in it,” she  said.

Growing a Community College in a Bad Economy

As a sign of prosperity during challenging times, NOVA, the largest institution of higher education in Virginia, is planning to give most of its 756 staff members their first salary increase in three years. The college is also building a new library, faculty offices and a student center.

“Because of your hard work, because of the great job that we do, more and more students are coming to us and are paying a premium to come to NOVA,” NOVA president Dr. Robert Templin told faculty at the Fall Convocation on August 19. “It’s still the best bargain around by far, but is significantly more than students were paying five or six years ago. Consequently, while other colleges are laying off teachers, this year, we have about 40 new faculty, in addition to replacements, and, next year, we are on schedule to have about 50 new faculty members. We literally are now generating enough money that we can afford salary increases for a significant portion of staff.”

“A decade ago we were funded at almost $5000 per student from the State,” Templin said. “By 2010, it will be half that amount. We’ve been cut $13 million in the last three years, there’s $8.8 million that we’re receiving in stimulus money and that’s why we’re not finding ourselves in a horrible crisis. In 2014, those monies are going to go away and we’ll have to find a way to replace it, which is a daunting problem, especially when the rest of the public believes everything is okay. There’s not going to be money around, even in a prosperous economy, for higher education.

“State aid to public higher education is going to continue to be reduced, if, for no other reason, because other obligations are going to gobble up whatever money is available. In the Constitution of Virginia, public education K-12 is guaranteed certain base funding and we’re going to have 55,000 more students in Virginia public schools. So, that’s going to be a huge demand. And, with heath care reform, the mandate to the states to make health insurance available and provide health care to all will eat up whatever other money is available,” Templin said. “NOVA has been restructuring. We’ve been making it, but basically, the Virginia community college system has not. It is not sustainable and will drive its way into the ground as it is.”

This year, NOVA has to earn reaccreditation. “In other words, academic advising for us is not going to just be a nice option, but an integral part of the educational experience,” Templin said. “The challenge that we have is that we have to be better in systematically providing information, advice and encouragement that enables students to progressively take care of their own educational destinies. We’re not holding their hands all the way through, we’re providing them with what they need so they can function on their own. Let’s remember that the ultimate measure of success with this effort, as with all of our educational programs is not about what we do in terms of faculty and staff, it is what our students do as a result of our efforts.”

Dr. George Gabriel is NOVA’s vice president of marketing and institutional research planning and assistance. “One of the problems with a community college is that we get a lot of students but we have retention issues – we don’t keep the students long enough so that they can stay here and make progress. Graduation is a problem. About 65% to 70% come and say they want to graduate, but only 10% to 15% end up graduating,” Gabriel said. “In 2005, one of the problems we had was that our enrollments were going down every year, about 3%, then 4%. We are also part of the State system and when you are part of that system, you get the funding from the state and there is a formula. If everybody else is growing and your enrollment is going down, the formula is set up in such a way that it penalizes your funding.”

Gabriel analyzes data and develops NOVA’s strategic plan. “We reversed the enrollment. Now we are seeing a 10% – 12% growth per semester,” he said. “I brought a group of marketing organizations in for three months and we didn’t do big things. We did little, little things. For instance, we found out that 11,000 students that applied never registered. We did a survey from these students and some of them said that they were waiting for an admission letter, never heard back from NOVA, lost interest because nobody followed up. Now, what we do is as soon as you apply to NOVA, within three to four days, you will get a letter from the President and a little brochure welcoming you to NOVA, saying that we are really interested in you and within eight or ten days, we will send you our class schedule, registration steps, numbers to call.

“We didn’t do this in the past. With community colleges you apply, you register, you show up on the day the class starts, so we didn’t have proactive management. We also realized a lot of high school students don’t go on to four-year schools and we hired high school outreach counselors for each NOVA campus. They will go to high schools in the area and talk to students and say, ‘You know, if you want to go to The University of Virginia, good luck, but if you don’t have a plan or a job, come and try NOVA.’”

It takes roughly three years to get a degree at NOVA. “And a lot of our students are part-timers and don’t take that full load all of the time. Some students take as much as four or five years to get their Associate in Science or Associate in Arts degrees,” Gabriel said. “And your credits are transferred and you save a lot of money in the long run. And you also get a quality education, so, our students who go to four-year schools do pretty good. If students plan well, they can graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in two years.”

The NOVA College Board will approve the Strategic Vision 2020 in October. “We are going to start really focusing on student success. Earlier, our focus was with making higher education available to everybody,” Gabriel said. “But now that we have a good handle on that, we are trying to do things differently because we are under a lot of pressure budget wise, so we have to be cost effective, while getting all we can by focusing on new ways of reaching students and teaching them.”