Despite stagnant faculty salaries and likely tuition hikes, the University is no less attractive to top high school students, said Chancellor Holden Thorp at a Monday meeting of the chancellor’s advisory committee.
Only 17 percent of students in North Carolina who score better than a 1400 on the SAT aren’t applying to UNC, Thorp said.
But he also told committee members that it’s time to increase tuition as a remedy for budget cuts, saying that families with students at UNC are generally more capable of paying its historically low tuition than at peer universities.
“We can’t go through another year of cuts and another year of no raises,” Thorp said.
“We’re going to have to do a good job next legislative session, and we’re going to have a really good discussion about tuition next month.”
A large portion of the meeting was spent reporting good news from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
Of students from the freshman class who scored above 1400 on the SAT, 82.7 percent applied, and about half of them now attend, Thorp said.
Additionally, the number of incoming students who were in the top 10 percent of their high school class has risen from 78.2 to 79.8 percent, Thorp said. The number of valedictorians and salutatorians has risen as well.
“It’s generally true that among the top students, we get about half of them to enroll,” Thorp said.
