Virginia Business Magazine features Liberty’s growth, new construction, and future plans

Virginia Business Magazine recently published the feature article, “A vision comes to pass: Liberty University has transformed itself into Virginia’s biggest school,” telling the story of a decade of impressive growth at Liberty, including new construction, new academic offerings, and a rise in enrollment.

Reporter Heather Hayes toured campus at the start of the Fall 2016 Semester, visiting the academic commons, the new concert hall in the Center for Music and the Worship Arts, the Montview Student Union, and the construction site of Freedom Tower and the Rawlings School of Divinity. The article explains some highlights of these state-of-the-art facilities, complete with a photo gallery, as well as interviews with President Jerry Falwell and Provost Ron Hawkins.

Hayes also chronicled the university’s history, through financial struggles in the 1980s to becoming a pioneer in online education. She quotes Alan F. Edwards Jr., director of policy studies for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia: “[Liberty] really got a jumpstart on the other schools, and they’ve remained popular because of the breadth of what they offer, which includes a lot of liberal arts programs, which is very unusual. They’ve also got the economies of scale to keep the tuition costs relatively low.”

Hayes pointed out that Liberty’s tuition is 30 percent below the U.S. average for private schools. “What’s more,” she said, “students’ second-choice schools weren’t other private, Christian colleges but Virginia public universities, led by James Madison, George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth University.”

Read the full article and view photos at VirginiaBusiness.com