Proposed plan raises UNC system tuition over next four years
J. Mikaela Anderson
Issue date: 10/19/06 Section: News
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Erskine B. Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina, which includes all sixteen public campuses statewide, wrote in the proposal that a special task force has been working on this plan for the past year.
Bowles added that the university's goal is to "meet its constitutional and moral responsibility to keep tuition as low as practicable, while at the same time making absolutely certain that we have the appropriate resources to provide our students with the highest quality education."
The main recommendation of this plan is to make sure that undergraduate tuition fees are not increased by more than 6.5 percent. This ceiling rate was chosen because it is the average annual tuition increase since 1972, when the 16-campus university system was created. This capped rate is slightly higher than the national average inflation rate of a college education, which was 5 percent in 2006.
If tuition increases at this rate, UNCW students will be paying $492 more a year by the 2010-2011 school year. That would mean an increase of over 20 percent from current tuition rates.
According to the proposal, in the past, tuition increases have ranged from 0 to 20 percent per year depending on the economy and legislature funding. Bowles wrote that tuition has risen under every UNC president because of necessity, and his presidency would be no different.
Other facets of this plan include requests of the General Assembly that 25 percent of new tuition revenues be added to financial aid pools and that another 25 percent of any tuition increase is applied to the goal of ensuring that campus faculty have salaries equivalent to the 80th percentile of their peers. Additionally, the plan proposes that tuition and fees for in-state students remain within the bottom quarter of peer institutions and that out-of-state students' rates remain below the top quarter of the same peer group.
More than once the proposal mentioned recent kudos from the New York Times that "no state in America except North Carolina still takes seriously keeping tuition as close to free as possible." Questions or comments regarding the tuition proposal can be directed to Erskine Bowles at ebowles@northcarolina.edu.
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