gchildress@heraldsun.com; 419-6645
CHAPEL HILL — The UNC Board of Governors’ budget and finance committee has signed off on campus tuition increases amounting to an average hike of 5.2 percent across the 16-campus UNC system.
The committee’s approval of chancellors’ requests on Thursday came a day before the entire board will be asked to approve them. If that happens today, the requests will be forwarded to the General Assembly for consideration.
The 5.2 percent average increase for undergraduate tuition — individual campus increases ranged from 3.6 percent to the maximum 6.5 percent — was offered up by UNC system President Erskine Bowles as an alternative to a state plan that would raise undergraduate tuition an average of 7.2 percent and steer all revenues to the state’s General Fund.
Bowles would like to avoid that, and under his plan, 50 percent of the $34.4 million generated from higher tuition would go toward need-based aid, 25 percent to retention and graduation efforts and the remaining for other unidentified critical needs.
He reminded the board that the UNC system’s schools are still a great bargain, explaining that the system could increase tuition at each school by $1,000 and still remain in the bottom quarter of each institution’s public peers.
And he said there is mounting pressure coming from some quarters to go with even higher tuition increases than those being proposed.
“I think this is a tough economic time, and it would be wrong to do that to families,” Bowles said.
The 5.2 percent average increase is the equivalent of about $131 for undergraduate students. No schools were allowed to increase tuition by more than 6.5 percent.
At UNC, for example, where Chancellor Holden Thorp has asked for a 5.2 percent increase, in-state undergraduate students would see a tuition increase of $200. Meanwhile, NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms has asked for a 5 percent increase that would add $113 on to undergraduate tuitions.
Greg Doucette, president of the UNC System Association of Student Government, a statewide organization that represents the system’s more than 215,000 students, told the Board of Governors that the organization had collected more than 20,000 signatures on a petition in favor of Bowles’ alternative.
“All of the students are on board with this,” Doucette said.
Out-of-state students across the system would also see higher tuitions, ranging from a low of $110 at N.C. A&T to a high of $927 at UNC.
The board also approved tuition increases for graduate programs and student fees.
