Scholarship funds don’t make cents for VCU students

For students in VCU’s Honors College who want to broaden their horizons next year, there are fewer choices on the table next year.

Honors students who rely on scholarship money to fund study-abroad experiences will be doing without, as will many students who rely on Honors College scholarship money in any capacity.

This year, students are feeling the effects of the national economic recession on their study plans. VCU international relations senior Madison Landa planned to travel to South Africa for the spring semester but the costs were too much to bear.

Landa said while her half-tuition dean’s scholarship did not apply to that specific program, she saw two $500 scholarships she would have applied for suspended because of a lack of funds.

These scholarships were the Volkmar Risch Memorial Scholarship for German majors, which Landa, a German minor, won the previous year, and the Honors College study abroad scholarship, which has been suspended indefinitely.

“There will be virtually no distributions this year due to the dramatic declines in the stock market,” said Jeff Wing, the national scholarship coordinator for the Honors College.

Landa found out about the Honors scholarship after deciding alternatively to travel to Vienna, Austria, this summer.

“I heard about the scholarships online and each time I went to advising, I was encouraged to sign up for them,” Landa stated in an e-mail. “I assume the cuts are fairly recent, as they were still encouraging me to apply for them the end of last semester.”

Glenda Bernhardt, the Honors College coordinator of recruitment and admissions, said the scholarship information no longer exists on the Web site.

“(We) are communicating this to anyone who asks about the scholarship,” Bernhardt stated in an e-mail.

Wing said the dean of the Honors College, Timothy Hulsey, and the other staff members are committed to raising additional funds to allow the college to resume its study abroad program.

“That will undoubtedly take time given the current market situation,” Wing said.

According to Wing, most of the college’s scholarships are based on an endowment system, which maintains the base fund is left alone and scholarships are funded only by the interest earnings.

The Honors College staff is working to stretch any remaining interest funds into the 2009-2010 academic year.

“We have some money that was carried forward from previous years, so we will be able to make a few awards,” Wing stated in an e-mail. “We are also in the process of contacting the donors to see if they would potentially make one-time contributions this year.”

Wing stated that any contributions that come in would serve as partial scholarships for Honors students for next year, but bringing in donations still will be more difficult than in the past.

“We know that the donors have all suffered from the same drop in the stock market that our endowed funds have suffered,” Wing said.

Reductions in the Honors College budget reflect the larger picture for VCU, which faces a $30 million cut in general funds next year, according to VCU’s Assistant Vice President for Finance Pam Currey.

Currey said VCU would have to deal with this budget reduction on top of a $10 million budget cut – 5 percent of the budget – announced this past October and instituted in February.

Currey said the administration divided the cuts among each of VCU’s major budget units. According to Bernhardt, the Honors College has made all of the requested budget reductions.

“These cuts have resulted in us needing to make some hard choices about programming and our curriculum, but we’ve been able to continue most of our initiatives,” Bernhardt said.