On the radar of tax and tuition dollars flowing through North Carolina’s 17 public university campuses, the salary increases announced last week for 12 chancellors hardly register as a blip on the screen. Aside from the backroom-nature of the bonuses being offensive to taxpayers, their timing is an across-the-board head-scratcher.
The Board of Governors’ market-based explanation for the raises would be more palatable if other state employees, including university faculty, were not simultaneously being placated with a one-time $750 bonus in lieu of any significant pay increase since 2008.
The increase for East Carolina’s outgoing Chancellor Steve Ballard amounts to $63,000, bringing his annual pay to $385,000. Many faculty and staff members question why Ballard should receive a golden parachute while they are being left on the ground.
ECU has grown and prospered under Ballard during difficult times. No one can deny that he has earned his salary, but the increase is not a reward for a job well done. The increase is not even about Ballard. It is about the power to attract highly qualified and talented university heads and convince those in place to remain.
Pumping up chancellor salaries while rank-and-file pay remains stagnant is further reflective of the big-business mentality increasingly associated with public universities. That trend is moving the UNC system further and further from its constitutional mandate that “the benefits of the University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the state free of expense.”
It is true that average tuition rates among UNC schools remain a bit lower than the national average. That status, however, does not reflect sustainability when tuition rates in North Carolina have increased at a faster pace than the national average.
A backroom deal to reverse that trend would be most welcome.
According to a report released in May by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, tuition among North Carolina’s public universities has increased 35.8 percent since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. During the same period, the national average for tuition increases at four-year public universities was 29 percent. State spending per student in North Carolina decreased during the period by 23.4 percent compared to the national average of 20 percent, the report said.
These are the national-average comparisons most troubling to students and families seeking higher education in North Carolina. They should be the most troubling to the UNC Board of Governors.
