When many students left for the winter holiday, they didn’t bring their concerns about the Board of Governor’s proposal to shorten the class drop date with them. However UNC-System president, Tom Ross, made sure to remind members of the Student Senate about the imminent policy change when he spoke at Wednesday night’s meeting.

Ross assured all in attendance that it is no longer a matter of if, but when the two-week, as opposed to the current eight-week, drop date will be implemented.

The policy change, which Ross said was partially developed due to last year’s budget cuts, is part of an attempt to make the UNC System more effective.

“We are under a good bit of scrutiny to become more efficient,” Ross said. “We have to ask, ‘What can we do about it as a system? What can we do more efficiently?’”

N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill are the only universities in the 17-instutition UNC System that still have an eight-week drop date, and according to Ross, the current drop date is not helping the system to reach its goal of higher efficiency. 

Of the nearly 675,000 total credit hours undergraduate students at N.C. State and UNC are enrolled in, 8.7 percent of those hours will be unaccounted for at the end of the semester. This means that, on average, undergraduate students drop about 50,000 credit hours each semester between the two schools — a fact that doesn’t sit well with Ross.

“I’ll be frank to tell you I think State and Carolina are outliers in the current system,” Ross said. ”If you look at the numbers across the board, State and Carolina stick out like a sore thumb.”

Ross addressed several questions from senate members about the policy change, and though none the questions were the same, one thing about his answers remained constant. The policy change is nonnegotiable. 

Ross said he is willing to compromise as to when the change will go into effect, and he is in favor of postponing the change, which is not popular with the student body, until the fall semester of 2014.

“The fall of ’14 is 18 months south of here, so that gives people the chance to suffer the pain and the agony and drop all the courses they can before then,” Ross said, somewhat jokingly.