Virginia Commonwealth University is continuing to lobby for more state funding to help pay for the Virginia Military Survivors and Dependents Education Program as more students are expected to enroll in the tuition waiver program for qualifying veteran dependents and spouses this fall.
VCU officials said during Wednesday’s board of visitors meeting that they expect around 1,500 students to enroll in the program for the upcoming fall semester, up from 1,006 students in the 2023–24 school year.
This reflects a statewide trend of continued program growth, according to Lee Andes, finance director with the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. He said that’s likely due to a number of factors, including increased program awareness.
“We haven't reached a peak,” Andes told VPM News. “I'm very confident in continued growth for the next couple of years, but it should slow.”
He said the program continues to surprise him, however, and he can’t say for sure what the enrollment will look like in the coming years.
For the upcoming school year, David Allen, VCU’s deputy chief financial officer, told VPM News the university’s estimated total cost for the program is $28 million.
VCU CFO Meredith Weiss, who spoke during Wednesday’s meeting, and Allen both identified VMSDEP as one of the school’s fastest-growing costs — alongside salaries and utilities.
The university will be getting more state funding for the program this coming fall, but Andes said the amounts colleges receive — which are based on program cost — haven’t been determined yet.
VCU has the highest total cost for VMSDEP’s tuition waiver statewide, Andes said, but is behind Old Dominion University in terms of student enrollment.
VCU received $11.7 million in state funding for the VMSDEP tuition waiver last fall — as well as an additional $1.5 million more recently, according to Andes.
But Andes said the total cost for this past year’s tuition waiver program at VCU — which has not been finalized yet — is about $21.7 million. That would leave a multimillion-dollar funding gap that VCU officials hope the state will help pay for.
Allen said the university has been making internal reallocations and using one-time reserves to pay for the state-mandated program.
But if the state were to “fully fund” VMSDEP, he said, those funds could be reallocated to help pay for student internships and help more students graduate on time — as well as to fund VCU’s goal of providing an internship to every student.
“This program is so expensive right now, it's preventing us from being able to invest in other academic resources,” Allen said.
Outgoing VCU Rector Todd Haymore told VPM News that “it's just one of those situations where you recognize the value and the important roles our veterans and their families play — and have played — in our lives. They're taking advantage of getting a good education through that program, but there's a cost associated with it.”
Earlier this year, lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D–Fairfax) insisted their budget proposals for VMSDEP would fully fund the program, while rejecting Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposal to includean additional $60 million in annual funding for it.
Kayla Owen, co-founder of the group Friends of VMSDEP, said she’s tired of seeing the program treated like a political football. She also pointed out that while everyone seems to want to “sustain” the program, there hasn’t been clarity about what sustainability looks like — and whether universities will be expected to cover part of the program costs going forward.
“What does sustainable mean, and how do we define those parameters?” Owen said. “Because without defined parameters, sustainable means one thing to the colleges and universities. It means something completely different to the state. It means something completely different to families.”
While she hopes the program will remain intact in upcoming legislative discussions, Owen pointed out that there’s still a sense of fear within the veteran community as a result of what happened last year — when lawmakers made controversial cost-management changes to the program, only to reverse them a few months later.
“There really needs to be an institutional mechanism for families to be part of policy conversations," she said.
Because $65 million in annual state funding for the VMSDEP tuition waiver isn’t considered one-time funding, Levi Goren of the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis said this amount — along with$17 million in annual funding for a separate VMSDEP stipend — should show up as baseline funding in the next budget cycle.
“It should be included in the default, assumed budget for the coming year, and it would have to be a policy choice to take it out,” Goren told VPM News – adding that it would also have to be a policy choice to add additional funding.
There’s also the potential for $20 million in additional funding to be allocated for the fiscal year that starts July 1 if tax revenues come in higher than expected — which Goren said has been happening for many years in a row.
In a recent revenue report, state Secretary of Finance Stephen Cummings stated that “we are confident that general fund revenues will exceed forecast.”
