Students Not Likely To Donate

The message is meant for undergraduates, meant to inform them of the importance of alumni contributions to the University and to ultimately groom undergraduates into becoming donors after they graduate.

The Good to Know campaign has been around since 1999 but has recently stepped up its efforts since the Carolina First Campaign entered its public phase in October.

But one has to wonder how much the current generation of UNC-Chapel Hill students will be willing to donate as young alumni. For the past four years, UNC-CH increasingly has struggled to keep pace with peer institutions as the state budget has shrunk and enrollment has increased.

In a virtual financial bind, UNC-CH administrators and state legislators have placed the burden on students' backs.

Since the 1999-2000 school year, the freshman year of the senior class, tuition has been raised four times, marking a 63 percent increase for in-state tuition and fees and a 31 percent increase for out-of-state tuition and fees.

One of those increases even was retroactive, forcing students to pay extra for a semester of classes they had already paid for.

And the tuition increases are far from over.

Just last Thursday, the Tuition Task Force met to discuss the next round of increases, which likely will start next year and call for a $1,200 increase over three years.

While the tuition increases have come along with financial aid packages, there are a significant number of students who do feel the full force of the burden.

They are the students who fall somewhere in between those who qualify for financial aid and those who have parents with a six-figure income. These students came into college expecting to pay a certain amount for a four-year education, and they have been surprised time after time over the past few years with hikes in their tuition bills.

Those students have been hit hard by the University's short-term solution to a long-term monetary problem.

Are these students going to want to give back to a University that has taken advantage of them financially?

According to Emily Stevens, the young alumni director in the Office of Development, there are many reasons that young alumni give.

She said some young alumni give because of a feeling of nostalgia, others give to preserve the value of their degree and some give because they realize the opportunities they had at UNC-CH and they want to ensure that others will have good experiences.

But if a student's experience at UNC-CH was marked by an unanticipated struggle to pay his tuition bill, he will not be as likely to want to give back.

Those students have good reason to feel like they are leaving UNC-CH with bitter tastes in their mouths.

While there have been many former generations of students that have been saddled with tuition increases, the frequency of and reasoning behind the recent tuition increases are rare.

Only one of the four recent tuition increases was to account for inflation in the economy. The rest of the increases were to either fund faculty salaries or to pay for the anticipated UNC-system enrollment increase.

While there are no set sources of funding for different University expenses, many have argued that the burden of financing faculty salaries and enrollment increases should fall on the state legislature and not on the students.

It is especially unfair for UNC-CH students to have to pay for the systemwide increase in enrollment when the money will be divvied up disproportionately across the UNC system, meaning that some of UNC-CH students' tuition money will likely go to fund enrollment increases at other UNC-system schools.

UNC-CH students won't even see the benefit of their own tuition dollars.

UNC-CH students have a right to feel a little miffed and taken advantage of by their university. Whether this feeling manifests itself in a diminished desire to give back to the school financially has yet to be seen.

But it's good to know that it's a possibility.

Karey Wutkowski can be reached at karey@email.unc.edu.