History is simply a collection of decisions we’ve made over the years. We know the roads we took to get here. Oftentimes, though, it’s easy to forget the roads we didn’t take. This is the fifth of a five-part series that looks at projects proposed in Virginia from the 1940s into the 1990s that were never built but which would have changed things if they had been. Today: the 1990s.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Virginia universities were looking ahead to an enrollment boom and how to handle it. Virginia Tech was already the biggest university in the state; the University of Virginia the third-biggest. State leaders looked to them to accept more students, but both were reluctant to expand much more. At the same time, both wanted to enlarge their presence in fast-growing Northern Virginia. Out of that was born an idea: The two schools would join together to birth a brand new school. It would be called Woodrow Wilson College and would be in Northern Virginia.
They envisioned a school with as many as 5,000 to 7,000 students, about the size of Norfolk State, Radford University or Virginia State today. There was also precedent for one college (although not two) starting another: Some of the colleges we now have in Virginia began as branches of a parent school. George Mason University began as a branch of the University of Virginia, Old Dominion as a branch of the College of William & Mary.
The proposed Woodrow Wilson College never happened, but the forecasted enrollment boom did. The shape of higher education in Virginia changed, as the state’s existing universities grew in place.
In 1992, Virginia Tech had 18,860 undergraduates. With graduate students, its total enrollment was 26,003. In the past academic year, Tech had 31,035 undergraduates and a total enrollment of 38,857.
The biggest growth, though, has come from the state school that was already in Northern Virginia: George Mason University. It nearly doubled from 20,829 total students in 1992 to 40,449 this past year.
Things that could have been:
Monday: A proposal in the 1940s to locate the United Nations in Albemarle County
Tuesday: A proposal in the 1950s and ’60s to route Interstate 64 through Farmville and Lynchburg
Thursday: A coal slurry pipeline from Southwest Virginia to Portsmouth
James Madison University also doubled, from 11,343 total students then to 22,879 this past year.
Now, though, universities across the country are looking at the opposite problem: the coming “enrollment cliff,” brought on by declining birth rates and more students opting not to go to a four-year school, whether out of financial concerns or different career choices.
If Virginia Tech and Virginia had launched Woodrow Wilson College in the 1990s, it might well have soaked up some of those students — meaning other schools wouldn’t be as big today as they are. There’s also a reasonable chance that by now Woodrow Wilson College would have become a fully independent school, which has been the trajectory of those other branch operations. However, how would this Woodrow Wilson College have fared with the coming enrollment crunch? It might be a good thing that the state didn’t start a new college. If it had, here’s one thing that would have surely happened: pressure to change the school’s name. Wilson’s standing in history has suffered as we’ve paid more attention to how he resegregated the federal government after some modest civil rights advances under Republican presidents in the late 1800s and early 1900s.