UNC Tuition for $500? State Lawmakers Consider the Possibility at 5 Campuses

Since Republicans assumed the majority in North Carolina’s legislature six years ago, the state has become a sort of lab for unorthodox higher-education-reform proposals. Remember the bill that would have required all University of North Carolina professors to carry a 4/4 teaching load? Or the plan to route the weakest students admitted to the system’s campuses to community colleges first?

Lawmakers’ latest idea: Cut tuition for in-state students to $500 a semester at five UNC campuses, including four minority-serving institutions.

The price tag would be a welcome relief for many students. What’s less clear is whether the state would pick up all or some of the tab for the lost tuition revenue. The measure, Senate Bill 873, includes no mention of additional state money for those institutions. Its primary sponsor, State Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican, didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment — though he said last week that the low-tuition plan would cost $60 million to $80 million and proposed that the money could come from the state’s general fund, according to The News & Observer.

The bill, introduced last week in the State Senate, is an attention-grabbing addition to a conversation about higher-education costs that is taking place in state legislatures nationwide. Several states have acted over the past several years to freeze public-college tuition for a year or two. In rare cases, states have even reduced tuition.

But no state has curbed costs as drastically as the North Carolina bill would, college-affordability experts say, and virtually all of the recent measures that froze or cut tuition used extra state money to make up at least some of the difference.

The bill’s focus on minority-serving institutions has also stoked apprehension across a system stung by concerns of broad “right-sizing” and lawmakers’ attempt to target one historically black campus for possible closure.

‘A Survival-Level Question’

If the state treats the plan as an unfunded mandate, faculty leaders and experts say, the financial losses for the five campuses, particularly the minority institutions, would be devastating, if not insurmountable. For instance, at UNC-Pembroke, a historically American Indian university, in-state tuition is about $3,500 per semester. A $500 rate would represent a nearly 86-percent drop, and the system’s Faculty Assembly has estimated that, if the current number of in-state students paid that amount, the institution would lose about $18 million in tuition revenue.

For the minority-serving colleges, “it’s a survival-level question,” said David M. McCord, chair of the Faculty Senate at Western Carolina University, the only predominantly white institution on the list.

Western Carolina has more resources than the other four and wouldn’t have to close, said Mr. McCord, a professor of clinical psychology. But he estimated that the campus would lose $26 million in tuition revenue — an amount that covers the salaries of 350 of the university’s roughly 500 faculty members.

“You’d have to decide which of the major programs or even colleges would need to be closed,” he said. “There’s no ‘let’s be more energy efficient’ or ‘let’s find waste, fraud, and abuse.’” He believes the state will compensate for some of the campuses’ losses in the short term, but he’s not sure how sustainable that spending will be.

Several of the bill’s provisions suggest that it is intended, in part, to reshape some of the state’s minority colleges — potentially altering their size, enrollment, and student diversity. In addition to the tuition cut, the measure would ask UNC’s board to consider lifting for each of the five campuses a systemwide policy that allows institutions to enroll no more than 18 percent of their students from out of state. The bill also would ask system officials to “evaluate what effect, if any, the current name” of each of the campuses “has had on that institution with regard to the number, academic strength, and diversity of student applications.”

The system’s two other minority-serving campuses, North Carolina Central University and North Carolina A&T State University — which both are rated among the top 15 black colleges nationwide in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings — are not part of the $500 tuition plan. (The legislation would provide $3.2 million for merit-based scholarships at those two institutions.)

System officials are still reviewing the bill and would need to conduct further analyses to determine its potential effect. “We share the goal of ensuring affordable access to a high-quality UNC education,” a spokeswoman, Joni Worthington, wrote in an email to The Chronicle, “and we are committed to working with legislative leaders to determine the most effective ways to achieve that goal.”

‘Hardly Any Black Men’

Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said he was pleased to see North Carolina lawmakers talking seriously about college costs and student debt. “The good news is that the bill raises the affordability issue in a really pointed way,” Mr. Callan said. Asking universities to absorb some of the lost revenue from a tuition cut is reasonable, he said.

But tuition cuts on their own aren’t long-term solutions to affordability problems, Mr. Callan said. And he sees “some inconsistency in what the bill is trying to do.” If the measure’s purpose is centered on affordability and access for North Carolina students, he asked, why would lawmakers consider opening up thousands of additional spots for out-of-state students? And why would the state leave those campuses in financial limbo?

“You can have a cut in tuition and a reduction in access at the same time, and that’s what I would be most worried about,” he said.

Stephen T. Leonard, an associate professor of political science at the Chapel Hill flagship and chair of the UNC system’s Faculty Assembly, said focusing the low-tuition policy on the minority-serving institutions would probably encourage more white students to apply to those campuses. “We have a lot of evidence that suggests that what will happen is they’ll become sort of magnet schools for students who are looking for cheaper tuition,” he said.

That, in turn, could push some racial-minority students — particularly those with weaker high-school credentials — out of the university system altogether, according to Mr. Leonard.

“If in fact we continue to use the admissions standards we have now, which we know are disadvantageous to underrepresented minority students, the chances are good that the demographics of applicants to those institutions will change,” Mr. Leonard said.

Encouraging more diversity at minority-serving campuses isn’t necessarily a bad thing, said Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Minority-Serving Institutions. To sustain themselves financially, Ms. Gasman said, “I think public black colleges really do have to reach out.”

Still, the institutions play a critical role in many Southern states, Ms. Gasman said, and fundamentally reshaping their missions could have serious ramifications. “If you don’t have the black colleges in North Carolina,” she said, “you have hardly any black men going to college.”

She also questioned whether North Carolina lawmakers had the best interests of historically minority campuses at heart. The state “does not have a great reputation for the way that it treats its HBCUs,” she said.

Mr. McCord said he’d welcome lower tuition at Western Carolina. And he’d like to see the cap on out-of-state students raised, since his campus is near several state borders. But “in the context of the current legislature,” he said, “it’s hard to trust the benevolence of this bill.”

“If we were in a different political climate — if Bernie Sanders was the governor — we could say, OK, cool, we’re going back to an earlier vision where the state provided higher education to its citizens,” he said, noting that North Carolina used to pay for most of the UNC system’s budget.

What’s the bill’s likelihood of becoming law? “We’re relatively certain that they have the votes to ram it through,” Mr. Leonard said of Republican state lawmakers.

Mr. McCord said recent controversy over the so-called bathroom law, known as HB2, makes him wonder whether lawmakers will think through the tuition-cut measure carefully. “The North Carolina state legislature has shown a very clear ability,” he said, “to impulsively pass half-baked legislation that has enormous negative consequences.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.