UNC System president wants tuition to stay flat for 8th year — and maybe a decade
UNC System President Peter Hans said Thursday he wants the system Board of Governors to keep in-state undergraduate tuition at the state’s public universities flat for the eighth straight year — and ideally, a full decade.
“Low tuition is at the heart of our compact with the citizens of North Carolina,” Hans said at a full board meeting of the system governing board. “We can only be the university of the people if we offer an education people of this state can afford.”
Annual tuition — which does not include required student fees or other costs such as housing — at the state’s 16 public universities ranges from as low as $1,000 at the four campuses that are part of the NC Promise initiative to about $7,000 at UNC-Chapel Hill. NC Promise provides in-state tuition of $500 per semester at Elizabeth City State University, Fayetteville State University, UNC Pembroke and Western Carolina University.
In “real dollars,” or taking inflation into account, keeping tuition flat for another year means tuition would be lower next year than it was “at the end of the Obama administration,” Hans said.
“There’s not a single other state in the country that can claim a similar achievement,” Hans said, “and I would like to see us extend this remarkable run to a full decade.”
Hans’ proposal comes as the nation confronts the topic of student loan debt. Borrowers will begin or resume making payments on their loans next month, the first time federal student debt repayment will be collected in more than three years after payments were paused in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 1 million people in North Carolina have some amount of student loan debt.
Hans shared system data that shows the share of in-state undergraduate students who graduate with federal student loan debt has decreased as the board has kept tuition flat — from 63% in the 2016-2017 academic year to 55% in the 2021-2022 academic year.
“Far fewer of our students are borrowing to attend college, and those that do are borrowing less today than they did three years ago,” he said.
The state also maintains a fixed tuition program, which ensures in-state students entering four-year undergraduate degree programs will pay the same tuition rate for all eight semesters they are enrolled.
Per state law, Board of Governors has final approval over tuition and fee rates each year.
Budget and finance committee chair Lee Roberts indicated the board would vote to keep tuition flat again this year, while noting that universities may request campus-level increases to required fees for students. Fees generally range from about $2,000 to $3,000 per year across all campuses. Roberts said the bar for the board approving any fee increases for the next academic year would be “quite high.”
Hans noted that keeping tuition flat may lead to “tough” financial decisions on university campuses, but said the university system has implemented new budget processes to allow for “more detailed decision-making about how to allocate resources and ensure that we’re operating efficiently.”
Hans also noted that personnel costs, especially faculty salaries, are the largest financial outlay of the university system each year. The system is hoping to free up some of those costs through a proposed retirement incentive program for tenured faculty, which is awaiting approval from the General Assembly in the state budget.
Hans said keeping tuition stable signals to North Carolina students and families that a college education can be affordable and attainable.
“Frustration about ever-rising college costs, which became so entrenched over the past two generations, has done real damage to the students we need to reach in order to fulfill our mission,” Hans said. “Poor and working-class families too often get the message that college is out of reach, that college debt is crushing, that degrees don’t pay off. We need to say loudly and clearly that in North Carolina, that simply isn’t true.”
