Gov. Pat McCrory’s 2013-2015 proposed budget will cut $138.5 million from UNC System funding. The decrease, a 5.4 percent reduction of this year’s UNC System budget, comes at the heels of a $400 million permanent budget reduction UNC absorbed two years ago.
During his budget announcement Wednesday morning, McCrory said his budget is concentrating on three major focus areas he mentioned in his February State of the State speech: the economy, education and government efficiency.
What he didn’t mention was that education across the board would experience cuts. McCrory’s recommended budget — $20.6 billion —cuts funding from public universities, community colleges and primary and secondary schools. Calling the cuts “transformations,” the governor hopes to reallocate resources to fund a pre-kindergarten program for 5,000 at-risk children and to add 1,800 more full-time teachers into public schools.
“This budget will help fulfill my promise to empower [students to] succeed,” McCrory said in his budget announcement.
To minimize the damage of the cuts to university budgets, the governor suggested raising tuition by 12.3 percent for out-of-state students from N.C. State, UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. A&T State, UNC-Wilmington, UNC-Central and the N.C School of the Arts. All other UNC System campuses would raise out-of-state tuition by 6 percent, offsetting the proposed cuts by $62.7 million, according to UNC Chief Operating Officer Charles Perusse. McCrory did not recommend increasing tuition for North Carolina residents.
UNC System President Tom Ross raised doubts about the budget cuts in a press release Wednesday, implying that the current cuts to the public university system add insult to injury after the $400 million cut from two years ago.
“I am very concerned by the magnitude of the new cuts proposed for our campuses … I worry about the impact additional reductions will have on our ability to provide high-quality educational opportunities to our residents and to assist in North Carolina’s economic recovery,” Ross stated. “The University appreciates the many fiscal challenges facing the state, including a stubbornly high unemployment rate. While parts of our economy appear to be rebounding, these are still difficult times for many North Carolinians, especially its families and students. And yet, the importance of education to our future remains clear and ever present.”
One thing on which Ross seems to agree with McCrory is the governor’s inclusion of the UNC Board of Governors 2013-2018 strategic plan in his budget, which will pour $63 million into the system for the next two years to “help guide further investment in our public university [system],” Ross stated.
The budget’s deepened cuts in education have come as a shock to state educators and students — N.C. State dealt with a 15 percent budget cut July 2011, and NCSU faculty and staff have received a 1 percent raise in the past five years — but Chancellor Randy Woodson said in a statement to Technician that he’s not bracing for further cuts yet.
“The governor’s budget proposal is the first step in the process, so the final impacts won’t be known for some time,” Woodson stated. “However, further reductions in funding beyond what we have experienced in recent years would certainly affect our ability to fulfill our mission of serving the people of North Carolina.”
The State House of Representatives and State Senate will present their own budgets in the near future, and once all of them are reconciled into a single budget for the governor to approve, North Carolinians will be waiting questioning the future of public education in the state. Until then, they can mull over McCrory’s platitudes from his budget announcement.
“Like any foundations that have stood over time, it starts getting cracks in the foundation, and it’s very similar to the foundation of our state in this point in time,” McCrory said. “We have a strong foundation, but the foundation has some cracks in it…we need to fix the cracks, so we can have a stronger foundation for future generations.”
