And the real losers will be the public, primarily the middle-class parents of students attending UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University.
This summer, UNC system administrators and the Board of Governors successfully staved off an attempt by the super-senators to free UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State to set tuition independent of the 16-campus system governing body.
UNC system president Molly Broad saw the measure, inserted into the Senate’s budget with no debate or public review, as a threat to the system’s unity. If permitted, it could have undermined the entire system and led to the kind of political free-for-all among the state’s public universities that the UNC umbrella was intended to prevent.
The provision came about, in part, because of Senate leaders’ anger over the UNC board’s decision force the big flagship universities, after several years of double-digit tuition increases, to hold the line in 2005.
Basnight, Rand et al. have bought into the notion that the state’s two largest public universities will decay into mediocrity without the money generated by continual tuition hikes.
Rank-and-file House members, though, weren’t having any of it. They insisted the provision be dropped, and it was.
That was the battle. On goes the war, its landscape shaped by this summer’s back-and-forth.
Its very authority nearly undermined, the Board of Governors wasn’t about to vigorously oppose any tuition increases for 2006.
After all, the board was simply responding to public pressure when it decided that schools wouldn’t be permitted to raise in-state tuition in 2005.
This same board presided over tuition hikes that have far exceeded inflation since the early 1990s. In each of the three years preceding 2005, tuition rose by at least 8 percent.
So it came as no surprise when a Board of Governors committee recently suggested a cap that would allow both UNC-CH and N.C. State to raise tuition and fees for in-state students by roughly 10 percent in the next school year.
Across the UNC system’s 16 campuses, increases could range from $271 to $451. The proposal is based on a three-year average of tuition increases at public universities across the country.
The full board will consider the recommendation this month.
It would be a shock if they didn’t approve it. It would be a bigger shock if the UNC system schools didn’t utilize every bit of the “cap” when next setting tuition rates.
The board has no interest in continuing a fight with Basnight and Rand. And individual school administrators have already proven that they have little regard for the state’s historic commitment to low tuition.
Only a lawsuit — one demanding that our courts tell us whether a state constitutional requirement that tuition be free, “as far as practicable,” has any meaning at all — will turn this tide.
Scott Mooneyham writes for Capitol Press Association. Contact him at smooneyh
@ncinsider.com
