Trustees approve five-year tuition increase proposal

In their final appeals to win the Board of Trustees’ approval for their respective tuition proposals, neither Bruce Carney nor Mary Cooper based their cases on numbers alone.

Instead, they described how the relative size of the proposed increase could help or hurt people, and in so doing, strengthen or weaken the foundations of the University itself. Cooper stressed that higher tuition would limit accessibility, while Carney emphasized the need to preserve quality.

Cooper, student body president, and Carney, executive vice chancellor and provost, co-chaired the University’s Tuition and Fee Advisory Task Force that developed the plan trustees approved Nov. 17 following a lengthy discussion. The plan now goes to the UNC system’s Board of Governors for consideration.

This year, UNC General Administration gave system campuses a one-time opportunity to raise in-state undergraduate tuition beyond the 6.5 percent cap – provided the school could justify the need for such an increase. The GA directive also required system schools to remain in the bottom quartile of their public peers.

If approved by the BOG, the plan approved by Carolina’s trustees would raise tuition for in-state undergraduates by $2,800 over five years.

For 2012-13, the increase would be $800 – a 6.5 percent increase ($333) plus the first part of the overall $2,800 increase ($467) – for a total 15.6 percent increase that year. For each of the remaining four years, the increase would be $583.

The proposal would raise out-of-state undergraduate tuition by $1,622, or 6.5 percent. Graduate students would pay the same percentage increase as their undergraduate counterparts.

“We couldn’t have been dealt a crueler hand by fate,” said board Chair Wade Hargrove. “It is never easy to raise tuition in a difficult economy. Our challenge is to strike a fair and reasonable balance.”

Speaking to students who attended the meeting to protest the tuition increase, Hargrove said that everyone in the room shared the students’ concern about protecting accessibility for people from all income levels and backgrounds.

“The goal of every member of the board, the goal of the task force and the goal of the chancellor and the provost is to make sure that no one who qualifies for admission is denied the opportunity to attend the University based on financial circumstance,” he said.

Cooper, an ex officio member of the trustees, cast the only vote against the proposal after presenting an alternative proposal to limit increases to 6.4 percent for current in-state undergraduates and 4 percent for current out-of-state undergraduates. The proposal also included a 5 percent supplemental increase the next two years for incoming resident students. She also advocated postponing action on any tuition proposal until December.

Personal appeals

Before the vote on the task force recommendation, Cooper told the story of a senior who said she chose Carolina over New York University because Carolina would meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need. Even with her financial aid package, the student told Cooper, she has had to hold down two jobs and take out student loans.

Cooper also told about a Kinko’s employee who helped her make copies of her proposal and recognized Cooper as student body president. The woman said she was not able to get the kind of education that Cooper was getting at Carolina and urged her to fight for lower tuition for others in those circumstances.

Carney acknowledged that the stories were moving, but illustrated an equally compelling case.

He shared an email he had received that morning from Jack Richman, dean of the School of Social Work. The school is ranked among the 10 best in the country, Carney said, one reason the school’s competitors have sought to lure away some of its most prized faculty members.

In the past three months alone, Richman told Carney, three faculty members had received outside offers and Richman could not make counter-offers to keep them.

“It is not so much the money as the morale” that is leading the school’s faculty members to accept outside offers, Richman added. And the dwindling morale comes from a growing fear that, if present trends continue, the school will not remain in the top 10 much longer.

It is that same concern about Carolina’s reputation and quality that led the task force to seize this one-time opportunity to raise funding to combat those trends, Carney said.

If approved, the proposal would generate an estimated $27.28 million, which would net $15 million for selective pay increases for faculty and provide the means to hire new faculty, restore course offerings that were eliminated this year in response to state budget cuts, add scholarships and begin implementing the Academic Plan.

“I don’t want this university to turn into a middling state university,” Carney said.

The remaining $12.28 million, or 45 percent of the new revenues generated, would be reserved for need-based aid for undergraduate and graduate students who qualify under federal guidelines, said Shirley Ort, associate provost and director of scholarships and student aid.

The percentage reserved for need-based aid has increased in recent years, Ort added, to ensure that Carolina can continue to offer need-based aid to 100 percent of qualifying students. It is a record, she added, that none of the University’s national peers can match.

Remaining competitive

Carney said the proposed tuition increase would keep Carolina’s tuition well within the bottom quartile of its public peers. That’s because those peers have been able to raise tuition more aggressively than Carolina has with a 6.5 percent cap.

In comparing Carolina to its 10 public peers, for instance, the $7,009 rate for in-state tuition and fees here was the 10th lowest, only above the University of Florida’s $5,700. The University of Pittsburgh had the highest rate at $16,132 and seven of the 11 universities in the group had rates of $10,000 or above.

Even more striking, Carney said, is how Carolina lags below its peers in raising rates. In 2011-12, the average change in rate among peers, excluding Carolina, was $1,203. At Carolina, it was $344, Carney said.

Chancellor Holden Thorp said the University had much to be proud of as one of the most accessible, high-quality and diverse institutions in the country.

“We established for the country the idea of higher education as a public good,” Thorp said. “No institution has done more to live up to that idea than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

But serving the public good is hampered if the University is allowed to decline in quality – and after four years of state budget cuts, the University is now teetering on the edge, he said.

This academic year, 556 course sections have been cut, resulting in 16,000 fewer seats for students, Thorp said. Library budgets have been slashed. And in the past four years, Carolina’s national ranking for faculty resources has slipped from 35th to 59th.

Faculty members and staff have not seen any state pay raises for three years. And many people have lost their jobs.

The University has done everything possible to protect the classroom, Thorp said.

Administrative departments have been slashed – human resources by more than 20 percent, the finance department by more than 30 percent. And through Carolina Counts, efficiency measures are yielding $50 million annually in savings.

In the current economic climate, it is unlikely that Carolina will see a significant increase in state appropriations, Thorp said.

Students and their families, he explained, will always be “the point of last resort” in protecting the quality of the institution.

“Unfortunately, we have reached that point.”

For details about the proposed increases, refer to www.unc.edu/depts/trustees/agendas.html.