Keeping College Grads Close

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The story below is a preview from our July/August 2018 issue. For more, Subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition.

For many years, one of the goals of Roanoke leaders has been keeping young people home. Local colleges do their part to achieve the goal.

The Roanoke Valley likes to keep college graduates at home and one good way to do that is to retain them through their college years. Local colleges and universities have responded to that desire with incentives that make attending college here attractive in a number of ways—including financially.

For example, 27 percent of Virginia Western Community College’s 12,000 students are Roanoke Valley residents, some of whom attend without having to pay tuition. VWCC has been aggressive in recent years in working to provide education to students who could not afford it and most recently, it had 819 students from local schools. The college banks on the decade-old Community College Access Program and hopes to intensify CCAP with a new infusion of $6.5 million by 2021.

That total—much of which has been raised—would benefit from half being raised by localities in the Roanoke Valley. Additionally, Carter Machinery of Salem has chipped in $300,000. Last year, VWCC had 850 applications from Roanoke Valley students, the most of any post-secondary institution in the region.

VWCC Director of Marketing Josh Meyer points to customized programs, short terms, open courses and training on-site (for students who have jobs) as special lures, but the two-year school also has courses for high school students at a college level that count toward graduation. The engineering program at VWCC sends grads to the prestigious program at Virginia Tech, which is very difficult to get into.

“We’re getting valedictorians,” says Meyer, who points out that 70 percent of the college’s students work while attending school. “We’re the first choice for a lot of students,” unlike in the past. VWCC is not an expensive education, but it still comes with plenty of financial incentives, including 99 named scholarships, Pell grants and a number of other options.

While Virginia Western is an easy choice for many Roanoke Valley students, other schools have their own advantages. Hollins, for example, features its Horizon program for “non-traditional students” who have been out of school for a while and want to return. They are older, more mature and motivated, says Horizon director Mary Ellen Apgar, who is a graduate of the program. Almost all of the 40 or so students in the program are from the Roanoke Valley, she says.

Apgar says most find out about the program by word of mouth—including her, who “didn’t know anything about Hollins, let alone Horizon” when she was in high school. “It’s one of the best kept secrets around.”

Students pay $37,500 in tuition—same as the traditional student—but there is a lot of help, including the $24,000 student transfer scholarship.

Filmmaker April Marcell, who graduated a few years ago as a 40-something single mother of seven children, is the poster student for Horizon. She went to William Fleming High. Hollins was, she says, “A huge asset in my career and future. It was the vehicle of my arrival to the start of something I didn’t know I had. … When I saw my first film with the class, I knew this is what I’m supposed to do. I’ve been doing it ever since. My first film was distributed world-wide right after I graduated.” Hollins, she says, “is sorta like one of my birthplaces.”

Heather Willis, a Hidden Valley High graduate, has two children and works full-time at Kroger while attending Hollins over the past several years. “She is one of the most tenacious Horizon women I have ever met,” says Apgar.

“Hollins did not recruit me,” Willis says, “but a family friend who was attending Hollins at the time raved about how much she loved her classes, her professors and she talked about the Horizon program for adult women going back to school. … The Horizon program, Hollins being a women’s college, the small class sizes, the beautiful campus and traditions, plus the fact that I could commute from home were the key components that attracted me to apply for admission.” She is studying biology and psychology with the goal of nursing school.

Northside High graduate Porsha Waddey has a schedule that is exhausting to contemplate. She attends school full time, works, maintains a home with her partner, plays basketball and is an actor with Hollins Theatre. She was directed to Hollins by a friend and “I got the courage to go talk to Mary Ellen and she gave me a tour and I was sold. The energy of her and other students was so warming and welcoming.” She graduated in May.

The program, she says, “has been extremely humbling. I’ve been through a lot while at Hollins and continued to shock myself at how resilient I can be. I’ve shown bravery, courage and determination to get through something that I’ve consistently failed at many times. I’ve shown myself that if I can get through school days on my last wind, then I can overcome almost anything.”

Other area colleges also compete for the Roanoke Valley students with a degree of enthusiasm. At the Roanoke Higher Education Center (REHC), there are offices of 14 Virginia colleges and universities who work with undergrads, graduate students and others who are out of school and working.

Lesa Hanlin of Virginia Tech says, “We have two types of corporate programming: open enrollment where any company can send employees, and corporate-specific trainings, which can be at our center or at the company.  We also host conferences on various topics which bring people from all over. We meet with organizations and work with them to develop training programs specific to their workforce.”

Sherry Wallace, Radford University director of media services, says that Roanoke has been “central to Radford University’s mission of service to Southwest Virginia. At the RHEC, Radford has full-time staff, who serve both graduate and undergraduate students.” Tuition and fees amount to $10,627 and popular concentrations are nursing, social work, criminal justice and interdisciplinary studies with pre-K through grade 6 licensing.

Wallace points out that “many [Roanoke] students work during the day and attend classes in the evening, so Radford makes courses available online and offers classes via hybrid delivery models that feature a blend of online classwork, traditional face-to-face meetings and videoconference connections with existing sections on our main campus.”

Roanoke College Dean of Admissions Brenda Poggendorf says that 15 to 20 percent of the typical RC freshman class is from the Valley. She says, “Local students ... have the benefit of being fully engaged in a top nationally-ranked undergraduate liberal arts college while living at home and saving room and board costs.  Others choose to live on campus so they have the full residential experience [living among students from 40 states and 30 countries].”

Poggendorf points out that “Over 90 percent of our students engage in research, study away, internships, service work and/or creative works. Those experiences, particularly the study away and internship experiences also allow students to expand their perspective beyond the Roanoke Valley.”

Like Hollins, Roanoke College is expensive, but there are a lot of grants and scholarships available to help make it affordable.

 Staying close to home—whether or not on campus—is the best way for many students to … well … stay home for the duration, bringing their education and talents to the local work force.

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