A Difficult Path for UNC’s Ross

As of Thursday, January 26, 2012

With pressures already buffeting him from every side, the last thing Tom Ross needed to hear was a vaguely threatening throwaway line from President Obama.

Ross, president of the multi-campus University of North Carolina system, must have taken it a bit personally when the president offered these words in Tuesday’s State of the Union address:

“So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. ... Higher education can’t be a luxury — it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

Easy for him to say. But not very helpful to Ross and other higher-education executives now trying so painfully to pick their way between the rock of gutting instructional programs and the hard place of pricing one’s institution out of the reach of already strapped working families.

Coping With Crippling Cuts

From the standpoint of idealistic policy, North Carolina has always held firmly to the principle that higher education should be available to all. And for the most part, it has always been willing to put its money where its mouth is, which is why the splendid UNC system has long been the envy of the nation.

But all of the state’s colleges and universities, like every other institution public or private, have fallen on hard times and now must make some painful choices.

The situation has been made all the more excruciating by the newly dominant Republicans in the General Assembly and their dogged and dogmatic refusal even to consider letting a modest sales tax increase to remain in effect for another couple of years or so — though failing to do so has laid a crippling hit of nearly a half-billion dollars on the state’s system of public education.

The Price for Shortsightedness

Is there fat to be cut out of the UNC budget? No doubt.

But it’s also true that, in this day of merciless global economic competition, the last thing we as a state and nation need to be doing is to be falling even further behind so many other nations of the world in the production of scientists and engineers and the other specialists that help make an economy tick.

At about the same time the president was speaking, Ross announced his recommendation that the UNC system should increase undergraduate tuition and fees by 8.8 percent for 2012-13. This would be followed by a 4.2 percent tuition increase for 2013-14.

From this distance, that looks like a reasonable compromise that makes the best of a bad situation.

It’s more than a lot of strapped households can afford — though not enough to please some of the system’s campuses, which had sought as much as 13.5 percent.

But there is still way too much educational blood on the floor, and future generations will pay the price for our shortsightedness and false economy.

More like this story

wdd101st 4 months ago

I'm sure there is fat that can be cut. Professors are paid big money to sit in offices while grad students teach their classes. If grad students can teach the classes, why do we need the professors?

Now Obama didn't have to worry about his college education. Tell me, who did foot the bill for him? Did he get scholarships for being a foreign student? Or did he get money from Saudi sheiks like some suggest?

http://unlawfulpresident.com/videos/obamas-harvard-education-paid-for-by-saudi-muslim-prince/

igliigli 4 months ago

wdd101st

Name a single professor who sits in an office and doesn't teach. I extremely doubt any exists. But massive waste in the UNC Schools does exist, the sports teams and the coaches.

TreadLightly 4 months ago

Civitas published a list of the ten highest paid people on the public payroll. All ten are at either UNC, NC State or ECU. Walter Chitwood at UNC gets $1,019,600 dollars per year, while lowly number ten Bret Sheridan only make $692,012 per year. Cost of living in Chapel Hill probably makes 3/4 of a million hard to live on.

Funny that college tuition is growing much faster than other inflation indexes. Funny that academia is the home of eglatarianism. (For everyone else?)

wdd101st 3 months, 4 weeks ago

igliigli 1 day, 2 hours ago

wdd101st

Name a single professor who sits in an office and doesn't teach. I extremely doubt any exists. But massive waste in the UNC Schools does exist, the sports teams and the coaches."

I'm guessing you are a professor since you have such a low opinion of athletes. I do believe that the majority of the sports programs in colleges and university bring in lots of money to colleges. Now I am talking about those that are in the big 3, football, basketball and baseball. The other sports are to a degree supported by the 3. Yes, coaches and their staff make good money at the "Big" schools. But then if they have winning teams, they not only bring in money from people at games, but advertising money and booster money. Do English, etc. professors make the schools a lot of money ? Now from threadlightly is post, looks like a lot of professors make good money. Shoot those professors teach kids and make way more money then the man that leads our country

I don't know that many professors where I could give you names but I did attend a university some years ago. At that time, out of the 8 classes I had in one year, I saw professors in maybe half of them during the course of the year. The start and near the end of the year. The rest of the time we had graduate students running the classes. We got course outlines and were told to show up at classes and have the work finished by the end of the term. Some how I just can't see a professor that makes a million a year grading the freshmen reading reports.

wdd101st 3 months, 4 weeks ago

Now let's look at this from the liberal point of view. If those professors were to give back say 50% of their salaries to the school to be used for helping low income students, how many students do you think could attend college?

Oh don't get so upset. After all, don't liberals want big money earners to give back lots of their money to the poor?