Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, D-Dare, asked his staff in January to examine possible changes to the UNC-system's tuition policy, including a graduated tuition plan.
Amy Fulk, Basnight's press secretary, said Basnight asked her to look into graduated tuition systems. "He threw out the idea of a graduated tuition increase to try to make colleges more affordable to lower-income students," she said.
But Fulk said Wednesday that Basnight has recently decided to abandon the plan and is now going to focus his efforts on ways to improve the state's need-based financial aid program by making it more user-friendly and cutting down on bureaucratic red tape.
Fulk said that in addition to questions that the plan raised about equity and fairness, officials were not sure whether revenue gained from charging higher-income students increased tuition would be enough to cover the costs of lower-income students.
Fulk also said it would be difficult for administrators to draft state and university budgets because revenue would fluctuate from year to year.
Fulk said she found examples of other universities that tried similar methods of charging tuition, including the University of Michigan system. All the schools Fulk researched stopped using the sliding scale system after one or two years or abandoned the idea before it was ever implemented, she said.
UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser, who spoke out against Basnight's idea when it first surfaced earlier this month, said that other options are available for students who need financial assistance, making a graduated system unnecessary.
"I understand the senator's intentions, which I thought were noble, but I thought the proposal was riddled with problems," Moeser said. "I think we can do everything the senator wanted to do with need-based financial aid."
Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand, D-Cumberland, said the idea had good intentions and made people think about other tuition plans. "It engendered a lot of conversation from a lot of people about tuition increases."
