Paul makes a good point. If we could turn the clock back (as we are so often accused of wanting to do) to, say, 1954, I would hazard a guess that almost nobody in North Carolina gave a hoot what the tuition level at the UNC schools was. That was before the UNC system began to blimp out like a sumo wrestler. A fairly small percentage of students enrolled and the institutions pretty much stuck to their educational knitting. As a theoretical matter, the low tuition was still objectionable, but with students taking generally sensible courses (even if they were being taught sludge in some — Keynesian theory in economics, for example) — there was much less reason to get upset. Today’s far-flung UNC empire spends money on lots of non-educational stuff and many of the students take courses that are either cotton candy or poisonous mushrooms. There is ample reason to complain about subsidizing all of that.