By Kathy Witkowsky
MISSOULA, MONTANA
Christina Adams is an accounting major at the University of Montana, where she has earned a 4.0 grade point average. She's proud of her excellent grades, and excited that, come May, she'll become the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college. Those grades, though, have cost her, and she knows they will continue to exact a price in the future-though she has absolutely no idea how much of one.
Afraid that a job would interfere with her academic performance, Adams, 23, has relied heavily on loans to finance three years of her education at UM, where annual in-state tuition and fees for incoming freshmen runs $4,033, and where a scholarship allows Adams, who does not have residency status, to pay 150 percent of in-state charges rather than out-of-state tuition. (Her parents picked up the tab for her first year of college, at Arizona State University.)
But until recently, when a reporter inquired about her situation, Adams had never crunched the numbers.
"I'm not managing my money very well right now," Adams acknowledged with a nervous laugh. "It's just easier for me not to know the totals."
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By Carl Irving
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Virginia's 15 public degree-granting colleges and universities and 23 community colleges have been hammered by the recession, following a dozen years of state policy decisions that sharply reduced financial support for the University of Virginia, the state's flagship campus.
This last budget squeeze will have dire long-term consequences, officials and educators here in the state capital and at several campuses predict. They blame a political fixation on lowering taxes, freezing and then sharply lowering tuition, and failure to accumulate a surplus during good economic times.
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