North Carolina State University is soon going into the hotel business. Construction is slated to begin this year on the Centennial Campus Executive Conference Center and hotel, which would offer 250 rooms and 29,000 square feet of meeting space, to be complemented by a 18-hole championship golf course, all built on the university’s Centennial Campus.
The controversy over minority enrollment in North Carolina colleges gets right to the heart of diversity, the cardinal virtue of academe. Although the issue has been vexing colleges for years, it doesn’t take an outside observer long to realize the absurdly simple crux of the matter. The problem with minorities is just that there are just so few of them.
The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina this week approved a systemwide, $1 increase in student fees to fund the UNC Association of Student Governments. The increase will raise the UNCASG’s budget from $2,500 to $165,000 — an increase of 6,600 percent.
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.
Moeser wants people to equate “knowledge” and “learning” with the kind of formal education he represents. But in his book The Joy of Freedom, economist David Henderson calls this “one of the biggest snow jobs.”
Despite the Lumina Foundation’s jeremiad over the “inaccessibility” of higher education hindering the goal of making college available to all citizens, other research indicates that such a goal itself is not socially optimal.
As the liberation of Afghanistan continues unabated and well ahead of schedule, and as Hamas takes credit for another bloody round of suicide-bomb attacks on civilians and teenagers in Israel, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill mulls a proposal to open a business school in the Emirate of Qatar.
Tuition increases at the 16 campuses in the University of North Carolina have upset students and parents. A Pope Center look at the issue found that the average increase this year for in-state students in tuition and fees at a UNC school was greater than the average increase nationally. Nevertheless, tuition and fees at UNC schools are still lower than the regional and U.S. averages.
