Near the very end of the 2003 legislative session, the General Assembly passed a new law that gives to all graduates of the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) a tuition waiver if they enroll in any of the campuses of the UNC system. With tuition charges going as high as $4,400 (at Chapel Hill), this policy is a substantial yearly saving for those families whose children graduate from NCSSM and then choose one of the UNC campuses.
But the General Assembly is not supposed to make laws to benefit select individuals or families. It’s supposed to make laws for the benefit of the citizenry of the whole state. So is the tuition waiver policy one that’s beneficial for the people as a whole, or does it just give a break to a few at the expense of everyone else?
The bill creating the waiver was sponsored by Senator Kay Hagan. In its favor, she said that NCSSM students “are going to be the entrepreneurs and business leaders and the really hard workers” in the state’s future.
It’s certainly true that some NCSSM students have gone on to do wonderful things in science and business in the 24 years of the school’s existence, but how does that lead to the conclusion that all of them should be given a tuition waiver? Senator Hagan’s reasoning seems to be that if students go to a UNC school, they are more apt to remain in North Carolina than if they go to college elsewhere – Harvard, Yale, MIT and so forth. Thus, the state can expert a “brainpower boost” by enticing NCSSM students with free UNC tuition.
That argument might have had some slight plausibility a century ago, but in our highly mobile world, it has none. Where a person goes to college means nothing in the national labor market. Top graduates of Chapel Hill or NC State will take the best job offers they get and it’s very unlikely that they would make geography the determinative factor.
By the same token, employers in North Carolina are not limited to people who went to school here. They can and do hire top applicants from around the country – and indeed, the world. Their brainpower pool is the same with or without the tuition waiver.
The mobility of workers makes any attempt by a state to hoard its brightest academic talent futile.
Another argument made in favor of the tuition waiver is that going to the residential school in Durham, where students may not have cars on campus, is a sacrifice for many, which the school must overcome with the lure of free tuition at a UNC school after graduation.
But that argument is also unpersuasive. The school has never had difficulty in recruiting a full student body prior to the tuition waiver policy. Furthermore, what’s so important about filling NCSSM to capacity? Sharp math and science students can get excellent instruction in those (and other) subjects at public or private high schools close to home. Where a bright high school student studies within the state makes no more difference than where a bright college student studies within the world.
While the tuition waiver policy doesn’t do the state any good, there are some good reasons to oppose it.
First, it is an unjustifiable discrimination in favor of a few. All NCSSM graduates are entitled to the tuition waiver, regardless of their financial circumstances. Some NCSSM students come from wealthy families who could easily afford the already low tuition at UNC. What’s the point in subsidizing them further?
Second, most NCSSM graduates have always enrolled in a UNC school anyway. Compared to the cost of almost any college alternative in or out of North Carolina, the UNC system is very low in cost. Making it even less expensive rewards NCSSM students for what they probably would have done anyway.
And third, this added subsidy for a few to attend UNC means that others in the state have to cover it. The projected cost for the tuition waiver is about $3 million per year once four graduating NCSSM classes are in college.
That isn’t a lot of money in a state with a budget deficit of approximately a billion dollars, but the government shouldn’t even spend $3 on a program that is neither necessary nor beneficial for the state as a whole.
George Leef (georgeleef@popecenter.org) is the Executive Director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.