Collective bargaining would hit Virginia’s higher education institutions with radical cost increases at a time when communities and colleges are already financially on the ropes. 

Radical cost increases means significant tuition hikes, increased reliance on state support, and a greater burden on Virginia families.

Significant compensation cost increases and higher administrative costs, resulting in overall budget increases in the hundreds of millions for some due to collective bargaining. 

The reality of overwhelming cost increases is that not only will students be paying more, but services will also have to be greatly reduced. Meaning Virginia families will be paying more for a lesser product. 

Collective bargaining makes centralized state administration inevitable, destroying the system’s distinctive strength. 

15 public schools and 23 individual community colleges cannot conduct individual labor negotiations. The resulting consolidated labor negotiations for the system as a whole will pull resources from the schools to what other states have found to be a large and expensive bureaucracy in the capital.

Collective bargaining kills the ability of schools to adapt, innovate, and cope with competitive challenges.

At the very time when schools need to be adaptive to the changing needs of Virginia students, this will put a massive managerial burden on them, as well as a financial squeeze that will require increased costs to students.

A 2024 JLARC study found that two-thirds of Virginia’s higher education institutions spend less or about the same per FTE student as similar institutions nationwide. 

Collective bargaining would put Virginia’s higher education institutions at a competitive disadvantage with our geographic neighbors. 

Virginia tuition is already higher than our geographic competitors. Further increases now will mean further enrollment losses to regional competitors, pushing more Virginia students out of state. 

Virginia’s top-ranked higher education system has consistently been the Commonwealth’s chief competitive advantage economically and in rankings. 

By crippling higher education institutions with bureaucratic costs, threatening the strength of our decentralized systems, and slashing the opportunities afforded to Virginia’s learners, mandated collective bargaining at Virginia’s higher education institutions will undermine Virginia’s chief economic advantage and could also risk Virginia’s AAA bond rating.