Tuition for North Carolina residents would climb 3.5 percent to $6,648 at UNC-CH and an average of nearly 4 percent systemwide under a proposal unveiled at Thursday’s UNC-system Board of Governors meeting. Out-of-state students at UNC-CH — after being slapped with an 11.7 percent hike in 2014 — would see a less than 1 percent increase under the proposal.
If the 2015-16 tuition proposal is approved, tuition for in-state students at UNC-CH will have more than doubled in the past 10 years.
Still, the University remains the least expensive school for in-state students among its public peers, which include the University of Virginia and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Board members did not discuss tuition and fees at length Thursday. They’ll have a meeting in two weeks to work through the proposal in advance of the board’s February meeting.
Dinesh McCoy, UNC Campus Y co-president, attended part of Thursday’s meeting and said he thinks board members are relying too much on tuition and fee hikes instead of pushing for funding at the legislative level.
“When you have a system where the people who are serving as the BOG are people who fundraised for the legislature and then don’t feel comfortable going to the legislature and asking for money, it’s disheartening to see,” he said.
McCoy said members of the UNC BOG Democracy Coalition will go to the General Administration building today to advocate for UNC’s centers and institutes. A highly scrutinized report on possible cuts to the system’s centers will be presented at the board’s February meeting at UNC-Charlotte.
The committee meeting also included a lively discussion of a proposed campus security fee of $30 per UNC-system student. A vote on the fee was ultimately tabled until February.
