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.
by Locker Room contributor