Delayed decisions: UNC system should not have forestalled fixes to budget woes

On July 7, the UNC-system Board of Governors approved the UNC system budget for the 2011-12 school year. Not surprisingly, the budget reflects the dire straits that our state and nation have been facing for the last five years. UNC-system President Thomas Ross says he will initiate a full-scale review of our place among peer institutions over the next year and, until the review is complete, the BOG has disallowed any tuition increases to mitigate our budget woes.

As current UNC students, we are unwilling to sacrifice the quality of our education ­— even for one year. Tuition increases, although not ideal, are sometimes a necessary tool in order to maintain our position as a top university.

Surely, the BOG has known for some time that the outlook would be grim, especially given that this year will mark the fifth straight in which the UNC system has suffered budget cuts. It is unfair to expect this academic institution to operate with significantly less funds from the state, without expecting some means of increasing revenues.

These cuts have the potential to corrode the quality of our education. And waiting a year to test the extent to which the cuts will affect our education is unfair to current students who are forced to play the role of lab rat.

With a systemwide cut of 15.6 percent, UNC-Chapel Hill will incur the largest cut among the 17 UNC-system schools: 17.9 percent, amounting to more than $100 million in cuts.

And when it’s all said and done, the cuts over the past five years will have amounted to over $1 billion to the UNC system.

UNC has consistently ranked in the bottom quartile for tuition rates among peer institutions and is consistently ranked among the top values for public universities in the nation. Obviously, this is a reputation that we have an obligation to maintain.

But President Ross was not hired with a mandate for inaction. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and waiting an entire year to assess our position amounts to a stall tactic that we cannot afford.

After four consecutive years of debilitating cuts, surely Ross could have anticipated the severity of the fifth in order to protect the quality of education in the upcoming year.

This debate mirrors the partisan divide found in the debt ceiling negotiations on Capitol Hill. But Washington bureaucrats, with all their faults and inefficiencies, are working on remedies to current problems as they arise, not a year later.

As the leaders of tomorrow, current UNC students deserve to have their problems dealt with in a timely fashion. Perhaps they deserve solutions that do not simply parallel the actions taken by our peers.

In his first year in office as UNC-system president, Ross should have been bold in making spending decisions that affect our education for the upcoming school year. While acting in a manner that is forward-facing is admirable, Ross and the BOG should keep in mind that current students have already bore the brunt of these budget cuts, many of them for multiple years.

It’s a shame that we’ll have to wait at least another one.