This offseason several topics have got people started discussing several items about the potential future of VT on the academic and facility side. Wanted to start a thread to consolidate these discussions. Looking for people's thoughts about the direction you see or know the school will be headed in the future in all things non sports related.
Forums:
DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.
Comments
The academic side of campus will have almost no parking other than the parking garage in the near future. Every lot on Prices Fork will be have a building on it except for the lot behind the parking garage. That is planned to have a bus terminal that will constantly have buses running from a couple off campus parking locations, as well as the usual routes. If they are going to expand the campus and student enrollment as they are saying this sounds like the best way. Keeps traffic lower around campus and downtown and will hopefully give more parking at the off campus locations. I know they've definitely been planning this since before Steger stepped down.
This is great for students. There's no reason for any student in blacksburg to drive (edit, to main campus during primary class hours). Bus systems are excellent and even Foxridge is a reasonable biking distance. The only reason anyone does is most kids are from NOVA and don't know any better. Terrible for tailgating though, where are all the non-parking pass people going to set up? And if everyone needs a parking pass either those prices are going to shoot up or be reserved for the upper echelons of donors.
EDIT: Since I probably spoke too broadly, I'm mainly talking about the need to drive to the main campus area at peak traffic times. If you're class isn't on campus, or you're talking about needing to be at class/whatever in the evenings when traffic isn't an issue it's not really a problem. It's everybody hitting their 8/9:15 am and jamming up all of Blacksburg so people can commute a mile that causes an issue that is only going to compound in the future.
Either way I should be set. Golden Hokie.
But seriously the bus system that Blacksburg and Tech runs is awesome. I used it to get on campus from off South Main every morning rather than drive most days. Finding parking was sometimes difficult even back in the 90's.
I can see parking pass prices shoot up and change to MWF parking passes and Tues-Thurs parking passes. Maybe do different levels too like having an on campus parking pass that is extremely limited and then an off campus parking pass.
Do they not have the R and C/G passes anymore?
They do.
I never had a parking pass, it was so easy to ride BT. If you didn't have to change your drivers license I would have worked for them. It was a great way to meet people from the apartments around you
To eliminate on campus cars, the bus schedule needs to run more frequently, and later into the night. When I was in school, I think it ended at midnight on weekdays and 2am on weekends? Also needs to be a quick/efficient way to get from Foxridge area to Patrick Henry/tom's creek area - when I was a student that route took at least 45 minutes if you timed your 'layover' correctly. If you failed, add 30 minutes to your trip. That is not acceptable.
As someone who has had to and will have to make it from one side of blacksburg (where main crosses 460) to class in 15 minutes, let me a sulfur you there are some reasons to drive.
How about no reason for 95% of students? Fringe cases will always exist, but they shouldn't drive the big-picture decision making. If everyone who lived in obvious walking/biking/bus distance didn't drive, people in your situation would have a much easier time getting to class on time is all I'm saying.
Fair enough. Also, apparently assure misspelled auto correct to a sulphur. Because y'know, english
I chuckled at that, it is still technically english, so you've got to give it some credit.
I suppose I should also have clarified that I meant that I had to make it from work to class. If I lived on that side of Blacksburg I probably still wouldn't take the bus buuuuuuut anyway.......
On another random note (trying to piss off #BeamerForPrez here) I'm very very confused by your name on here.....
I dunno, but if it's in reference to the band he might just become my new favorite TKPer.
It's a bit of both. Mogwai are dangerous, as accidentally feeding them or getting them wet after midnight causes a Gremlin situation that could tear apart the entire town. Not good.
On the other hand! Young Team absolutely destroys, and I suspect if you played it loud enough foundations would crumble and entire buildings would fall over, so they're dangerous as well. And I used to drive around Blacksburg blasting Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will with the windows up and it always felt like floating through town in an indestructible bubble for some reason. That last one's not dangerous, but it's a fond memory.
I disagree with your statement, "There's no reason for any student in blacksburg to drive". I just graduated a year ago and I'm not from NOVA. It depends where you live in Blacksburg. I happened to live 3/4 mile from the nearest bus stop and over 2 miles from the academic side of campus. During the fall semester I rode my bike to campus and back because the temperatures were reasonable. However, once it hit winter in Blacksburg, walking 3/4 of a mile to wait for a bus and then doing the same on the way back was unreasonable when I could drive to campus and park in less than 15 minutes (about the amount of time it would have taken just to walk to the stop not accounting for waiting for the bus and then the ride). The reason I lived where I lived was due to the affordability of the housing ($275 / month).
While it is certainly possible for many students to get to campus via the bus system, it often would add unreasonable commute time especially in the winter. In the end, I rode my bike in the fall and drove in the spring every year. Just my two cents.
There was a program (still in 2008 when I graduated) that basically required you to forfeit your ability to buy a parking pass for a semester in exchange for 20 free on-day parking passes. Had to sign up each semester, but no limit to it. I used this all three years I lived off campus. It basically covered exam days and 6 weeks of winter we were in school around the holidays.
I know you probably didn't mean any offense, but the way you phrased that comment is a little unfair to students from northern VA.
I myself am from Northern VA and didn't have a car as a student. I can also say that a good number of people I knew from Richmond and Virginia Beach drove to class.
There have been lots of times I wished I had a car as a student. I often had to work in the lab late and carry my equipment back to my apartment. Going to the gym was also not convenient (if you went to mccomas) for me as a bus rider since I had to walk a significant distance. Weekends were especially inconvenient as a bus rider, as I often had to go to campus to work on projects.
I do agree that campus car traffic should be decreased, and like some of you are saying, it would be nice to have more frequent busses and a quick way to move from one side of campus to the other.
Yeah, I could have phrased it better, though for the record I'm from NOVA too. It was more to address what can eventually happen if you don't take action and reduce the need for driving. NOVA is terribly planned out and all of their colleges are commuter campuses with no real college feel. Blacksburg isn't going to get that bad anytime soon, but if you're not planning far ahead, you're heading down that road.
I'm certainly not saying never drive. On the weekends and later in the afternoon when the lots are open it's perfectly fine and sometimes necessary, the problem is when the entire student body is trying to drive to campus at the same time, it gets to be a little much and is only going to get worse.
Yeah, I agree. It was pretty irritating as a bus rider going home around 5PM because the streets were jammed up. Especially all of those people making the right turn onto UCB. A large number of people do go to class and back home at the same time so they should definitely consider taking the bus.
I don't know how the new bus loop will change things, but if I were still a student, I wish they would make the buses have stops that serve both sides of the drillfield and the library, as well as McComas. Then increase the frequency of the buses on the weekend and I think nobody could complain.
While there is no need for the majority of students to drive to class, it is necessary to drive in Blacksburg and it's very convenient to have a car. I agree with everything mentioned above. Student housing in Blacksburg is usually close to campus, but most are not within everyday walking distance. I don't want to bring up UVA, but UVA off-campus and on-campus student housing is much more condensed around the campus. Clemson is the opposite, where off-campus housing is sometimes miles from campus. We're more in the middle, most off-campus housing is within walking distance but far enough to require a bus system. The problem is that most of the year it's cold, and we had three weeks straight this year where it was under 20 degrees. With buses running every 30 minutes after 6 pm, stopping at midnight on weekdays (and they stopped Saturday late-night PHD this spring) some people not living close to stops, inconvenient destinations (Fox Ridge, south end of campus), and students trying to manage their time cars remain a reasonable mode of off-campus transportation.
EDIT: Just saw your response post above. My thing is more about evening, not students going to class.
I remember my freshman year I lived in Thomas so I was a 2 minute walk to my classes (McBryde and Randolph mostly). My friend at UVa lived way down past the stadium in a freshman dorm. It would have taken him 30+ minutes to walk to class. Basically UVa has to grow out into Charlottesville and they're at the whim of private property owners. If a landowner would rather have rental properties right next to campus than sell out, you get your off campus housing close to campus and your on campus housing way the heck away from central campus.
Clarification--On-campus non-freshman housing. VT dorms are prime location. But yeah I get what you're saying. My point with that was that instead of having big apartment complexes on Patrick Henry, they should be east of Main, but there are reasons why they're not and a guy can dream.
Yeah I should have clarified, my fault. I had a car in Blacksburg and drove semi-often in the evenings/weekends. If I was working late (Comp Sci, I was working late a lot), I'd take the bus home at 5, make dinner and drive to class. Would have been very difficult without a car (though I had plenty of foreign friends that did it by necessity). But as for getting to class at normal hours? Driving often took longer than bus (or walking/biking even) and yet it still seemed that the majority of people were doing it. I'm just glad to see they're being proactive about it.
Funniest thing for me was seeing parking passes on cars in lots less than a quarter mile from campus. People living that close to campus would drive to class. I lived a little more than a mile away, and walked to all my classes that weren't 7-10 pm.
They might need to look at more ways to encourage bicycling; maybe work with the town to make the roads a little more bike friendly (although they're not too bad as it stands).
The future plans for the university from a facilities standpoint really fascinates me. I saw in their presentation that they plan on building new residential colleges on the golf course that circle around a small quad and then these two quad areas encompass either a mini-Drillfield or a student center in the middle that contains dining services, a gym, and study areas. The plan is based off of Yale's residential colleges as well as Oxford's. Although I hate seeing the golf course go, we fortunate to have an on-campus one, I see it as inevitable with the increasing enrollment figures. I think the university should start building on-campus apartments. That will attract upperclassmen to stay on campus. http://www.bov.vt.edu/documents/Open_Session_Materials/Buildings_and_Grounds_open_session_materials.pdf (slides 87-92)
That's one of the discussions that broke down into future discussions. Being someone who has watched VT from the outside, only been on campus a few times, it's interesting to see the future potential growth.
Virginia Tech is truly unique in the amount of land we have. It's really, really rare to have so much room to grow. Yes, the golf course was awesome when it was 18 holes and I biked over with my clubs, but it has always been planned as future growth.
This relates to the parking and multi-modal ideas presented above. Whereas we have the land to surface park everything we need, and we did until 2006, it still may not be the best choice. Creating a multi-modal site is a no brainer these days, park and ride and get to where you need to go.
One of the tricky aspects for VT in the future is the expand without losing the essence of the campus, which is that pastoral landscape setting. Just because it's open space doesn't mean it isn't valuable (the argument at the heart of the Stadium Woods debate).
Final point: What's the future of campuses? That's a different discussion altogether and one that every college is having right now. Intuitively, a residential campus like the one proposed seems to be a bit of a last-ditch gimmick to show value of being on a campus instead of in your parents basement in Stafford taking onlines. But, that last-ditch effort could spur the next 50 years of the campus and university itself. The future of campus could mean that in 50 years, we won't need anywhere near this much square footage. Or it could be that the square footage we have becomes a de facto research park where the education and employment are seamlessly meshed. No idea, I'm not that smart.
What I heard from my department head is that they are thinking about moving labs over to the CRC and expand that part of campus.
My quick two cents on Tim Sands on increasing the number of students is that I'm not too sure how I feel about it, but currently none too well. I really don't want to massively increase our student population unless we're increasing the number of faculty (FACULTY -- not TAs) for classes and getting new buildings. I'll admit I'm not following anything too closely, so perhaps they are doing this, but last time I checked a few months ago there weren't any inklings that they were doing this.
TL;DR - Too many students on an already saturated academic setting; need more builidngs / faculty.
I know that at least in my department they have hired one new professor and already have been budgeted for another hire next year. The engineering department as a whole knows that they will need to hire new professors. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing to be ABET accredited that there is a minimum faculty-student ratio.
I don't think it is necessarily Sands own vision to expand, but the Board of Visitors. All of these recent expansions on campus were in the plans before Steger stepped down, so I think Sands was just the person that agreed with the overall vision of the BOV.
A critical issue will also be the ability to employ tenured vs. adjunct faculty. This is something happening throughout the entire university system in the country. Colleges are expanding via a certain business model, using "cheap" hires of adjuncts, who make a pittance for pay, no benefits, and no job security. Many adjuncts actually live in (or close to) poverty so that the universities can make more money and get more students, expand, repeat.
Big soapbox issue for me (someone in academia), so I don't want to derail the thread, but it is of interest when we're talking about the expansion of the university. Are we expanding academic freedom and security of our employees while enhancing opportunities for a growing body of students, or are we looking to make a ton of money by turning into a diploma factory?
We're not quite DeVrey or Univ. of Phoenix (Online), but colleges are indeed businesses, so every step we take (no matter how small) is a step towards making a ton of money and become a diploma factory.
Public colleges are not businesses. They're 501(c) non-profits. Money made is reinvested in the university in some fashion, unlike the for-profit diploma mills which focus solely on making their owners and investors more money.
I'm not quibbing what they're filed as, but if you don't think they're a business then you're sorely mistaken. Money might be re-invested into the university, but they are charging for a service that they provide to us (as the customer). In the end, they want to be in the black and will do so by all means neccessary.
This is where the problem lies. You're right, this is what the universities should be doing. Instead, across the country, what you're seeing is an increasing push to get rid of "expensive" tenure-track faculty to hire adjuncts at a fraction of the cost. It's a cycle, and there are numerous external factors affecting what's going on. Too much to write here in a coherent way. But something has to give. Expansion for the sake of expansion is wrong. Expansion to pad bottom lines without proper reinvestment in research and teaching is wrong. I don't have an answer, but it's something to absolutely keep an eye on, at every level (student loan structure, grant overheard requirements, state funding levels for the universities). Something has to give, and I suspect we'll see it soon.
I agree with this, and these are major concerns. I was just trying to draw a clear line between state colleges and the for profit schools, since the comment I replied to mentioned them in the same breath.
Certainly a distinction worth making. More and more, it seems the line is blurring. Follow the money...
Higher education is about to change drastically. The bubble will pop soon (within the next ten years), similar to the housing bubble. Lectures will become outdated, classes will become heavily online based, or in person team/project based. I'm not sure what the correct way to plan for this change would be (hence why I am not a university president), but I think/hope this is a strategic move by Prez Sands.
You've said this multiple times, and I still don't agree. I wouldn't say academics is a bubble ready to pop. That's absurd. But the landscape is changing, and its catching up to technology, which is good. Still won't fully eliminate the lecture, though, and you will always have some classes and topics that have to be taught through a lecture., but by and large, classes will be far more hands-on, in the fields that will allow it. Thankfully, VT is helping to lead the way in adapting to the changing environment, and when the changes come, we will come out smelling like roses. President Steger did a lot of good in positioning us to lead the way into the new era of higher learning, and President Sands seems to be the perfect guy to lead us through the transition.
School is getting more and more expensive, with a lower and lower ROI (varies by major and university, yes). Something has to give. If this is to be avoided, schools will make drastic changes to improve quality of education without major changes to the consumer cost. I'm not sure how likely this is.
I think the lecture-hall style class will be eliminated. As I responded below, there's no difference between a 100+ person lecture hall and an online lecture. Classes must teach collaboration and open ended problem solving. There is no reasonably paid job where problem solving is not essential; so why is this not taught in ALL majors and ALL classes?
This is extremely subjective. Some classes can be taught online, but I never see a traditional lecture structure going away. Complemented by technology? Sure. But replacement? No chance. Faculty I know that do online courses usually hate them because they never get to know the students, and invariably most of the class waits until the last minute to do anything, causes panic, and then becomes unmanageable. Many freshman math courses are now taught online, and everyone I know that took them learned to find patterns in answers rather than actually learning calculus. That's a terrible disservice. Maybe that means those courses just need to get better, but I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to try to learn organic synthesis online from some pre-concocted lessons. I want a professor with a piece of chalk/whiteboard marker walking through things, interactively, so we can discuss.
Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but I only had 2-3 teachers who led traditional lectures who actually made any effort to get to know me (Roger Chang, Mark Paul, Christian Wernz). I found the majority of my professors were far more interested in their research than teaching.
It's a reciprocal relationship. I got to know most of my professors. They like that, and most of them really do care about their students. A few were really bad, granted. But with a purely online class, the common student assumption is "everything I need to know is here, I can do what I want when I want, and the professor is only there to give me a grade." No sense of developing a relationship, an instructional collaboration if you will. The professor is reduced to a perfunctory job that a grad student could do, and I think there is a risk of a serious detriment to educational quality if we remove the human element from it. I don't know anyone that I went to school with that ever had a positive opinion of an online class, with the notable exception of Music Appreciation (not because they enjoyed it or learned, but because it was an easy A). Professors are a mixed bag, but the majority that I had contributed positively to my education.
I agree with much of this. I will say I have had more teachers shoe me out of their office hours, saying something to the effect of "teaching isn't my job" than teachers who have gone out of their way to help me. There's a big difference between 'teaching' and drawing numbers on chalkboard for 100+ students. If you're going to the latter (which far too many professors do IMO) than I'd rather take an online course.
Fair enough. It's a good perspective. Something else that factors into it, too, is the nature of their position and their current position. With grant funding so tight for research, there is a cutthroat competition for funding, and thus doing good research to get said funding. A non-tenured Assistant Professor is going to be crazy trying to juggle (1) bringing in the money to get tenure and thus job security and (2) getting reasonable teaching evaluations. Of course, the money matters more when it comes time for that evaluation. Then you have the tenured, established professors who are comfortable as hell just doing whatever they want. The teaching doesn't matter, the lab is humming along on established funding that gets renewed, and life is good. Then there's everyone else in between (which is the majority).
Worth noting, too, is that different disciplines have different funding mechanisms. Some departments/schools guarantee salary, others are on "soft money," where your grant money is how you put food on the table. On top of having to teach classes.
Chang is da man!
Did he teach Spanish?
He pretty much taught me physics, higher-level math, and other engineering classes by himself whilst our other professors (not TA's -- PROFESSORS) were just shit.
Edit: Disclosure, I'm an 08 AOE graduate.
Community reference will always get a leg from me
IMO, we're going to see government subsidization of education expenses, and we're going to see it soon. Just about every western nation is outpacing us in this regard.
I agree. The current "lecture" style of teaching is outdated and needs to go. Classes need to be more hands on into what is being taught. Too many times students stop paying attention 15 mins into class.
That
What's driving the cost increases?
1) amenities every public college in america is in an arms race to have the best food, the best dorms the best classrooms the best student lounges, best research labs etc. Ironcially they're not really that focused on quality of what happens in the classroom.
2) staff inflation. staff outnumbers faculty at a lot of schools these days, which is completely backward. part of it is the admin needed to run all those fancy amenties and student programs.
3) cheap money supply. (easy loans for students) It's a tough problem - you want your population to have access to college education, but by not setting limits on student loans colleges have little incentive to control costs. They can always raise tution their students can always get more loans.
4) all the while, state funding has steadily decreased over the years, magnifying the issue of cost which always trickles down to the ones footing the bill (the students).
I hope classes won't become heavily online based. I know all the online classes I took were not nearly as effective as the lectures and in-person classes I attended.
In my personal experience, there is no difference between a 100+ person lecture and an online class, except that I can rewind the online class.
Agreed, but that doesn't make one or the other a good solution. Or even an acceptable solution, IMO.
I probably had 4 lecture classes with 100+ students: engineering econ, advanced stats, discrete math, and intro sociology. Those last two classes, taught by Bud Brown and Bill Snizek, I wouldn't trade for a computer screen if you paid me Bud Foster's annuity 10 times over.
Plus, in this overly "connected" society we seem to be moving toward, there's one crucial element of a lecture class that no online class can replicate: seeing real live people.
I want to share my experience having completed my first year of medical school about 2 weeks ago. First off, my school currently has an 80% attendance policy, meaning you need to be in attendance for at least 80% of the lectures for the particular class. At the beginning of the year I found going to lecture very helpful. I was able to hear from the professor directly what was important and what wasn't but as the year continued on my opinion changed.
The pace of medical school is something you hear about all the time. The professor's favorite analogy was that medical school was like taking a sip water from a fire hydrant. The material wasn't necessarily overly difficult but the sheer volume of information was daunting to say the least. During this past year we took many classes and several professors had their own style. Some professors preferred lectures while others preferred online lectures (we called them DSAs).
Personally as the year dragged on it became more of a nuisance to attend lecture and I typically favored DSAs (designated student assignments). However, what I often required was what we termed CIS/BSCs (clinical integration sessions/basic science correlations). During those lectures we would review the material presented from a 2-3 hour DSA for a 1 hour CIS/BSC. The professors would pose questions to the class and we would answer them and discuss the information. This was invaluable to me. I got an map of what I should be studying while being able to perform my tasks on my own time.
So in summary I agree I think that the world will begin to go more towards online lecture format, however, I don't believe that doing away with lectures all together is going to happen either. Lectures are necessary in my opinion in order to clarify many complex topics and give a road map for the student as to what is relevant information.
CIS/BSC doesn't sound like a lecture... In my experience, a "lecture" is a one-way knowledge transfer from a professor to a student. In a room of 100+ students, there is little time for discussion, problem solving, critical thinking or hands on work. There's no reason the initial knowledge transfer should be done in person in a university, but it does need to be supplemented by all the things I mentioned above.
One difference is that the good looking coeds in a 100+ person lecture are real, live, and probably much more approachable than the ads in the margin on your online class. How does one meet fellow students and get the true college experience online? Of course, being an older guy, I feel the same way about social media and dating sites, so that's a qualifier I must admit to.
There were coeds!?! I was in Engineering, so my meeting of fellow students of interest happened downtown or at parties or football games.
Sociology major in the early 70s. 'Nuff said?
Random ass question here. If you were sociology, I'm guessing you might have had some crossover into psych classes. Did you happen to have any classes with professor Joe Germana from the psych department?
I did indeed. Took a variety of sociology, psych and poly sci classes and had Joe for at least a couple of classes. Long enough ago to forget details, but he was one of several profs I remember fairly well. Klaus D'Albequerque was another, and with my electives, I treated myself to a couple of Bud Robertson's civil war classes, perhaps my favorite lectures in my time at VT, along with Physics as a Liberal Art, professor forgotten, but the class was about as much fun as learning could have been.
Clone Boyer. Boyers teach everything. Problem solved.
Apologies in advance for so much text...
#sources. I've been fortunate enough to have sat in on presentations on future academic and operational plans by Dr. Sands as well as having first hand access to some of his top staff. Much of my general points below have been touched on or beat to death in this thread, but here are some of my notes from these meetings.
Momentum and expansion. These are two general but key pieces of what the next 10 years look like at Virginia Tech. The previous (and some currently outgoing) administration did a fantastic job in both athletics and academics in keeping the university relevant and focusing on the program areas we do well at. The plan is to keep increasing public relations and branding outside the mid-Atlantic to expand our notoriety nationally and globally. Dr. Sands has a particular vision for Tech continuing its roots as a land grant institution and is adapting the model of other peer land grant schools in his plan. Much of the focus will be on STEM-H related academics. A common thread of our peer schools is size/reach/breadth in enrollment and degree programming. Often, but not always, higher national rankings coincide with larger enrollment for land grant schools. We are increasing enrollment by about 500-600 annually for the next several years. Not sure where the ceiling is on that. On the record, on and off campus housing and academic faculty/facilities are to grow proportionately with the enrollment increase.
EDIT: I just read the BOV presentation linked somewhere above. On page 66 is the answer. "500 additional entering First-Year students in Fall 2015, resulting in 2,000 student net growth over four years. Possible growth beyond 2,000 over an eight year period to approximately 29,000 undergraduates by fall 2022. Virginia Tech intends to house approximately one third or up to 2,350 of the new enrollment growth." Note: 1/3 on campus housing is what it is today approximately. Also, we are now currently the 2nd biggest public university in VA at 31,224 behind GMU (33,791) and slightly ahead of VCU (31,163). Not sure about their growth plans but we could be potentially the biggest in the state in a few years.
National Capital Region. The DC presence is part of that momentum and expansion portion. Even though there are some quality schools in the NCR, Dr. Sands believes that we are uniquely positioned to be THE technology school in the area. This includes government research (defense and health) and also business. As a Pamplin business grad myself, I was sad to see that the full time MBA program was discontinued in Blacksburg. When I thought long and hard about it though, it makes sense in shifting our MBA resources to DC when this is where our rankings are increasing (our Blacksburg business rankings are decreasing) and most top MBA programs tied to major metro/industry area.
Blacksburg campus developments. It's no surprise that the remaining golf course area is the future expansion site for both academic and residential buildings. The BOV report shows all of those proposals. I personally think they are great. I know that the new dean of the Pamplin College of Business (Dr. Sumichrast) has his eyes on eventually relocating the entire college to a state of the art complex in this area of campus--though many other colleges will be fighting for space here too.
Also, the CRC already opened Phase 2 wrapping around the airport side and will butt up against the new 460 interchange project. The dairy complex construction at Kentland Farms is nearly finished and the cows and other stuff will be transported down there soon. Phase 3 of the CRC is across 460 is earmarked for even further in the future.
Research. The university is going to keep pushing this one hard from a rankings perspective. We are currently #38 and climbing. Personally, I know that there's a lot of manipulation on how research expenditures are reported, not just by us but likely by most universities. I just don't really understand why we are so strongly positioning ourselves in the research realm.
That's all I have for the moment. Not sure if I forgot anything. I know it's all broad strokes, but it does kind of answer the question right?
I'm an alum in a grad school that isn't Blacksburg. Is it possible to do research with VT in my situation?
My god. I can vividly remember when President Steger succeeded President Torgerson, his main stated objective was that Virginia Tech would become a top 100 research university under his watch. It's like a Virginia Slims commercial. You've come a long way, baby.
Just to throw this out there, a day or two ago this op-ed appeared in the washpost:
Washington Post article by Hunter Rawlings
I like what Rawlings says. But then, I also liked receiving handwritten letters, watching the CFB bowl system without caring about who is "champion" for the year, and changing my car oil myself. Just because he's right in principle doesn't mean that's how the real world works.
I think Rawlings misses the point - or at least, he doesn't address it. (WARNING: Generalizations ahead. I know there are exceptions. My basic point still applies IN GENERAL.) The real reason students try to slide through college without make an effort to engage or emotionally invest in their education, is because the bulk of students aren't there for an education. They are there for a degree, because EMPLOYERS care about the degree more than the education. The students need to punch a ticket to get a job, so that's all they do.
EDIT: Dang it, that was supposed to be a reply to HOAT's post with the WaPo op-ed.
Yes, I think you are right. Most kids are going to college for a piece of paper and good times. Only a small % is actually going for a engaged education. This is something I encountered in Australia while doing my Grad degree. the school offers two tracks. 1) Degree through Research 2) Degree through CourseWork.
The Research track opens you up to funding and a host of other university supported benefits (including housing, meal plans, additional tuition funding/scholarships, etc), but required you to make contributions to the university's research with published dissertations, articles, etc.
The Coursework track was just that. you took more courses than the research track to fill a prescribed list of requirements. If you passed the requirements you got your piece of paper, but you did not get the extra benefits.
I thought that was brilliant. It invests in those that are investing in the university, and fast tracking those that are there to get the degree to move on to professional work.