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Sometimes people say well, you took the cuts and you're still standing, you must be fine.
It's the things you don't see. They don't see the larger classes necessarily.
They don't see the permanent faculty we haven't been able to hire.
They don't see the research dollars that we could have had, had we added faculty that
we were entitled to by the funding formula. We lost about 170 faculty members that we
never hired because of the budget reductions. And about 120 staff.
They don't necessarily see the long lines for financial aid, or there are so many things
the average person would not see as a result of budget cuts because they drive by and see
the doors are still open. So it's a serious situation we've been able
to manage it. We knew this was coming three or four years
ago and we stopped hiring and we just simply held the line on adding new people.
I felt it was immoral to hire a person if we knew a year later we would have to lay
them off and that was the situation we were in so we didn't do that.
The cut we took this year was $33.5 million, about 16% of our appropriation, but we want
to remember that cut, there were other cuts that came prior to that
took us up over $50 million in continuing funds and millions of dollars in one-time
funds. So we had to deal with that.
A tuition increase this year of 6.5% is gonna bring back about $6.7 million of that 33.5,
so I don't think anybody really expects, or realizes maybe that the hole created was
so large, and we are all already one of the least funded
to institutions in the UNC system before this started.
We've tred to keep the tuition within some sense of balance, we know we would never get
a 30 or 40% increase in tuition to get back all that we lost,
but we have to get something back, and we have to rededicate some of it to financial
aid. So in our particular case,
we've tried to keep tuition just as low as we can,
and in fact we're still in the lowest on 25th percentile of our peer institutions.
The next year or in the beginning of next year when the tuition increases go into effect,
the total bill, tuition, fees, debt services, everything is going to be about $5800, and
if you look around the country, that's a bargain.
I think if you go back to the early days of Charlotte College and the founding of the
Charlotte center and then the emergence of the two-year college and the leadership provided
by Bonnie Cone, you have to just take great inspiration in
where education can take people. And there were a lot of veterans coming off
of World War II who knew they needed education, they were going to go out into the workforce,
and Charlotte College provided them that opportunity. And that hasn't abated at all.
In fact, if you look at the demand for higher education right now,
it's never been higher. If you look at the predictions about what
kinds of educational backgrounds will be needed in the next couple of decades,
you'd have to say the future of higher education is extremely bright.
What isn't bright is a very clear strategy for supporting it.
And the notion of a public education, which for many years meant that people would
go to shcool with no tuition or little tuition or little or no debt,
has now been turned a litte bit on it's head. It's almost a user fee.
Now it's nowhere close to that yet in North Carolina,
because in our system the state pays about two thirds the cost of an undergraduate education,
but in some states, it's getting closer to 50-50.
And students are being expected to pay a much higher percentage of the cost of their education.
I would hate to see us get any higher, but I don't yet see a strategy for getting
us any lower.