By Aaron Keck
(Additional reporting from Carolina Connection)
The State House of Representatives has proposed a 15.5 percent budget cut for the UNC system. That’s an attention-grabbing number, but students on campus, particularly minority students, may be even more affected by impending cuts to need-based financial aid.
"African-American students, particularly African-American males...already have a high dropout rate," says UNC junior Bryant Best. "If you take away need-based aid from a person like that...I really think it's going to have a catastrophic effect.”
Included in the House proposal is a plan to limit need-based aid to nine semesters per student. That’s four and a half years, which Republicans say should be more than enough time to graduate. UNC Office of Scholarships and Student Aid Director Shirley Ort agrees—with one qualification.
"The nine-semester state aid rule makes sense," she says, "assuming that students can do what we expect of them."
Therein lies the rub: that 15.5 percent budget cut would force the UNC system to eliminate 1500 faculty positions and hundreds of course offerings. According to researchers at UNC-Wilmington, those cuts would raise the average time to graduation by a full semester.
UNC junior Sean Olson says cutbacks have already made it difficult enough to meet the graduation requirements in four years. "When there are prerequisites required," he says, "I take the prerequisites...but then when I'm ready to take (the class) again, it's not available because they won't be offering it during that time.
"So I have to stay another year, another semester, and spend more money that is unnecessary."
And UNC Director of Diversity Education and Assessment Cookie Newsom says the problem is compounded for minority students--who, "because of disparate conditions for economics...frequently (take) longer to graduate."
Conservatives who support the cuts see them as an opportunity to reexamine the requirements for graduation. Joe Coletti, director of Health and Fiscal Policy Studies at the John Locke Foundation, says UNC can solve the problem by simply requiring less.
"They may be requiring too many (of) what are deemed 'core' courses that don't really have anything to do with what you're studying," he says, "that are just there because somebody at some point thought it might be a good idea."
Failing that, though, it’s likely the traditional “four-year plan” may become less and less common at UNC—making that nine-semester limit all the more important for students struggling to afford to stay in school.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Sunday, April 24th 2011 at 4:46PM
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