At a Glance
VCU admits 83.7% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
Net price data temporarily unavailable. Visit each school's net price calculator directly.
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Sticker price
Not reported by this school
Debt at Graduation
53.6%
receive need-based grant aid
$29,417
average debt at graduation
VCU graduates carry an average of $29,417 in debt.
Merit Aid
2,628
students received merit aid
$6,887
average merit award
Getting In
VCU admits 83.7% of applicants.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 34% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 3% of the class submitted
17% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
Virginia Commonwealth University considers your essay Important — a strong essay can differentiate an otherwise average application. Demonstrated interest is Not Considered here — campus visits and emails to admissions won't affect your odds.
Student Life
33.3% of VCU classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At VCU, 33.3% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2024–25, Section I-3 (class sizes)
17:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
Live on campus
27%
Men in fraternities
1.55%
Women in sororities
3.01%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
VCU's student body is 38.7% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
VCU graduates 45.6% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
VCU graduates 45.6% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
VCU
45.6%
4-yr grad rate
Data pending
* In-state cost of attendance. Out-of-state students pay significantly more.
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2024–25, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
63%
Overall 6-yr rate
59%
Pell recipient rate
There's a 4 point gap between overall and Pell Grant graduation rates. Worth asking the school about support resources.
Freshman Retention
85.3%
85.3% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Richmond.
VCU doesn't have a campus so much as a neighborhood. The Monroe Park campus is stitched into the Fan District — blocks of 19th-century row houses, apartments and coffee shops, with academic buildings on ordinary city corners and Monroe Park, Richmond's oldest, doing the job a quad does elsewhere. The medical campus sits a mile east downtown, linked by a university shuttle, so health-science students spend their days beside a working hospital system rather than in a teaching building. The city rewards students who go looking: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and VCU's own Institute for Contemporary Art are both free, the monthly First Fridays gallery walk on Broad Street is largely powered by VCU students, and the James River runs Class III–IV rapids inside the city limits. The trade-off is real — there is no gated, green, self-contained version of college here, city noise and city problems come with the address, and Richmond is a mid-size city, so anyone who wants big-metro scale drives two hours north to get it.
Notable Alumni
Baruj Benacerraf
Won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the genes that regulate immune response. He was accepted at the Medical College of Virginia — now VCU's medical campus — in 1942 after 25 other medical schools rejected him, and graduated in 1945.
Class of 1945
Sylvia Harris
A pioneer of social-impact design who served as creative director for the redesigned 2000 U.S. Census form, sent to 80 million households. She earned her BFA in communication arts and design at VCU in 1975 before an MFA at Yale.
Class of 1975
Dave Brockie
Frontman and co-founder of GWAR, the costume-and-spectacle metal band that came out of Richmond's cheap studio space and VCU's art scene in the mid-1980s. He graduated in 1986 with a degree in painting and printmaking, and the band's monster suits were built by fellow art students.
Class of 1986
Kenneth Sullivan
Chief executive of Smithfield Foods, one of Virginia's largest companies, from 2015 to 2020. He took his business degree at VCU in 1988 and spent more than a decade in accounting and consulting before joining the company.
Class of 1988
Mo Alie-Cox
An NFL tight end who never played college football — he was a four-year shot-blocker for VCU basketball and signed with the Indianapolis Colts as an undrafted free agent in 2017. He earned a bachelor's and then a master's in criminal justice here.
Class of 2017
Danny Avula
Mayor of Richmond since January 2025, after running the city and Henrico health district and Virginia's COVID-19 vaccination effort. He earned his medical degree at VCU's School of Medicine and trained in residency here.
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Major city
Richmond, VA
Best For
Traditions
Touching the Ram Horns
"Ramifications," a 14-foot bronze-and-steel ram's horn sculpture by an alumnus on the Student Commons Plaza. Students are meant to touch it exactly three times: at orientation, when they receive their class ring, and on the day they graduate.
Havoc at the Siegel Center
VCU's pressing, trapping style of basketball has a name — Havoc — and an arena built to amplify it, with the Rowdy Rams student section and The Peppas, the pep band that became nationally known during the 2011 run from the First Four to the Final Four.
The Capital City Classic
The twice-yearly basketball meeting with the University of Richmond, three miles across town and in the same conference. It ran under other names for decades before being renamed for the 2014–15 season, and it is the rare rivalry where both student bodies live in the same city.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Richmond
Washington, D.C.
2 hoursAbout 110 miles up I-95, with Amtrak from Main Street Station the saner option on a Friday. Free Smithsonian museums, and the internship and interview circuit.
Virginia Beach & Norfolk
1 hour 45 minutesThe nearest Atlantic beaches, close enough for a day trip once the weather turns.
Williamsburg & Yorktown
1 hourColonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Busch Gardens, all on one short stretch of I-64 east.
Charlottesville & the Blue Ridge
1 hour 10 minutesWineries, breweries and the Blue Ridge foothills; Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive are about an hour further on.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Richmond International Airport (RIC)
15 minutes from campus
For international flights: Washington Dulles International (IAD) — about 2 hours by car.
Pro sports nearby
- Richmond Flying Squirrels MiLB (Double-A)
Career Proximity
Richmond punches well above its size for corporate headquarters: Dominion Energy, CarMax, Altria, Markel, Performance Food Group and Genworth are all headquartered in the metro, and Capital One's largest campus — the region's biggest private workforce — sits just west of the city. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, one of twelve in the country, is downtown, which makes economics and finance internships unusually reachable for an undergraduate. Health care is the other engine and the closest one: VCU Health is among the region's largest employers and its hospitals are VCU's own medical campus, a mile from the main campus. Washington is two hours north, so government and policy work is in range without a summer relocation.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- VCU Health
- Capital One
- Dominion Energy
- CarMax
- Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Downtown Richmond — the campus borders it; Washington, D.C. is about 2 hours north
Who Thrives Here
VCU is a 21,210-undergraduate public university woven into Richmond's Fan District rather than set apart from it, and that shows in how students live: 27% are in university housing, so roughly three-quarters commute or rent nearby. Greek life is close to absent — 1.55% of men and 3.01% of women join — which makes this a very different social proposition from a residential flagship, and an easy one to rule in or out early. The trade-offs are financial and academic. VCU meets 28.8% of demonstrated need, well short of what a family reading a $17,240 in-state price might assume, and 45.6% of students finish in four years against 63.0% in six. What that buys is a real city campus, a 17:1 student-faculty ratio, and a medical campus a mile away that its health-science students train inside.