UNC schools are discussing raising tuition again, some schools by up to $300. For many UNC students, it is their first taste of hardship, and for many parents of UNC students, it could mean their last gasp at shielding their fledglings from hardship. “I may have to give up flying home,” says Weinlaud. “And if I drive to Florida for Spring Break, that’ll cut out two whole days of partying. It’s not fair!”
North Carolina’s colleges and universities are hardly the only ones in the nation affected by an economic downturn in their home state. A report released this summer shows how many public universities and colleges across the country received cuts, some substantial, in their budgets.
According to the most recent data, taxpayers in North Carolina pay the fourth-highest per-pupil amount in the nation to subsidize public-college students in their state. Also, N.C. students attending the state’s community colleges or public universities pay the second-lowest amounts in tuition and fees in the nation in either category of institution.
Shortly after winning the glorified popularity contest to be next year’s student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jen Daum announced her plans to develop a course to teach students how to lobby the legislature. As reported by The Daily Tar Heel March 8, “Daum said students’ lack of knowledge about lobbying is a major reason why the university’s governing bodies have not been receptive to students’ concern in matters like the recent tuition proposals.”
Although tuition increases have generated the most controversy in the past few months and years at schools in the University of North Carolina System, another increasing cost of attending UNC schools — increasing student fees — has gone unremarked.
Less than a year after hundreds of University of North Carolina students marched to the Capitol to protest UNC budget cuts and large tuition increases, tuition increases are again being proposed for several UNC schools, yet the students are now mute. They were in August when legislators debated a 9 percent, retroactive tuition hike for all UNC system students (which passed Aug. 30) that The Daily Tar Heel wrote a story about it, “Low Turnout for Anti-Tuition Rally Frustrates Leaders,” on Aug. 28. “Despite the possibility of additional charges,” the DTH noted, referring to the tuition increase, “rally organizers had difficulty enticing student involvement.”
Some illegal immigrants may now pay resident tuition to attend public universities in California, thanks to legislation signed last year by Gov. Gray Davis and a vote this week by the University of California Board of Regents. In North Carolina, a bill before the Senate would create a commission to study doing the same thing here.
The UNC Board of Governors last week allowed tuition increases at eight campuses, which drew fire from some board members.
In a contest of crises, the floods of Floyd won out over the underfunding of UNC. Or so it would appear. Certainly the state faced a crisis in the hurricane’s wake. But is the situation facing UNC right now a crisis?
The beginning of a new year is really only the progression of one day after the next, natural and mundane, but human custom has made it so that we note it as the crossing of a threshold. This customary observance is heightened now as the upcoming threshold is especially (but only) numerically significant (from year 1999 to year 2000). Here Clarion Call bows to custom to mark this crossing by presenting three higher-education issues of 1999 that will bear watching in 2000.
