By Paul Fulton
Higher Education Works

Two years ago, the board that oversees our state’s public universities adopted a plan with an ambitious goal:  To raise the percentage of North Carolinians with a bachelor’s degree from 26% of our adult population to 32% by 2018. [1]

Projections indicate that the jobs of North Carolina’s future will increasingly require a college degree.  Yet from the repeated budget cuts our public universities have seen from Raleigh, it’s not clear our elected officials embrace the goal adopted by the board they appointed.

So what is the vision for higher education in North Carolina?

Based on the repeated reductions, we can only pose questions about state leaders’ vision:

• Is it to shift the financial burden to students and their families, as we’ve seen in Virginia and other states?  Even before the UNC Board of Governors recently approved tuition increases for the next two years, our public universities had increased average tuition by 86% over 10 years. [2]  This limits access for increasing numbers of students from middle-income families, and it comes despite a provision in our state constitution that says tuition should be as free as possible.

• Is it to sacrifice the quality and breadth of instruction?  After years of meager or no raises, over the past two years our state universities have seen a dramatic increase in faculty attrition – 76% of the professors who received offers from other institutions accepted the competing offer. [3]

• Is it to reduce capacity?  The state Senate made a threat to close a university campus last year [4] – the same year North Carolina emerged as the 9^th most-populous state in the nation. [5]  Demand for higher education is not shrinking in North Carolina.

• Or is the “vision” simply to make continued incremental cuts to our universities with each revenue shortfall?  That can’t continue indefinitely without jeopardizing North Carolina’s tradition of offering a quality education at an affordable price.

So what’s the vision?  At the moment, we don’t see one.

Higher education has distinguished North Carolina from other states.  Yet at a time of tremendous technological change, and as other states ramp up investment in higher education, we seem to have doubts about the commitment to do the same here.

Paul Fulton is the Chairman of Bassett Furniture Industries and a former Dean of the Kenan-Flagler School of Business.  He is a Co-Chair of Higher Education Works.