Fitzsimon File

Good for the UNC Board of Governors. The Board voted Friday not to raise tuition for in-state students at any of the UNC system campuses next year, despite pleas from 14 of the 16 schools to let them raise tuition to pay for a wide range of programs.

The Board will decide next month about increases for out-of-state students and fee increases at individual universities. Raising fees has become a backdoor way to make the students pay more without attracting the negative publicity of a tuition hike. And even with the Board’s decision, the General Assembly could still raise tuition for in-state students when lawmakers pass a budget this summer.

But for now the momentum is to keep tuition where it is and that drives the anti-government, anti-community crowd crazy. They have proposed a 40 percent increase in tuition, the goal to eventually raise it enough to pay the full cost to the state of educating a student.

Otherwise the theory goes, the state is subsidizing the university somehow, even though it is a public university. Apparently the government can subsidize itself.

Even worse, the anti-government folks claim it is their concern for poor and lower middle class families that drives their twisted analysis, saying that low tuition means that the poor are subsidizing the wealthy students that attend public universities.

Interesting that when the anti-community folks want to reduce funding for UNC, they admit that there are poor people in the state. When discussing the increase in poverty, dispute the numbers then by pointing out that most people considered poor are really not poor at all, because they own a washing machine.

Back to the alleged subsidy. First of all, the student body is different at every campus in the UNC system. The income level of an average student at UNC-Pembroke or Fayetteville State University is much different than that of a student at UNC-Chapel Hill or North Carolina State. That makes blanket generalizations about public university students inaccurate.

Not to mention that the state tax system ought to be structured so the wealthy pay more taxes than the poor. Then they both can attend a public university for the same tuition.

Even more important is the philosophy behind raising the tuition to cover the full cost of educating a student. It is then a user fee system, not a public institution. It raises a fundamental question that applies to most of the state policy debate.

Do we want to be a state that where each person takes an interest only in their own individual education, health, opportunity—or do we want North Carolina to be a place where we all make investments in public institutions because it improves the quality of life for everybody?

The first version leads to tuition three times its current level and exorbitant admission fees to museums, state parks, and other attractions. After all, if you don’t go the art museum, why should you pay for it? Take it one more step. If you don’t have children, why should your tax dollars support public schools? The logic is absurd.

Every school in the UNC system makes North Carolina a better place to live and we all benefit, whether a family member attends a UNC school or not.

The problem for some people appears to be that UNC is public, supported by the people of North Carolina. That is something to celebrate, not lament.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2005 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.