RALEIGH – The heads of the University of North Carolina, the North Carolina Community Colleges, and the organization of independent colleges all appealed for money at a legislative committee hearing Tuesday.
Hope Williams, president of the North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities, asked that the governor’s new EARN scholarship program apply to students in private schools as well as public. She made the request during a joint meeting of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Education. UNC President Erskine Bowles and Community College System President Martin Lancaster also discussed the budget recommendations made by Gov. Mike Easley last month.
Williams was responding to an initiative proposed by Easley during his State of the State address. The EARN scholariship program would provide $4,000 in grants, for two years, for students from families of 200 percent of the poverty level. Easley plans to spend $50 million on the program during the 2008 fiscal year and $100 million in 2009. Of those funds two-thirds is expected to go to the University of North Carolina, and the remaining to the community college system.
Williams said that adding the state’s private colleges and universities would cost $5 million. Currently, Easley has allocated for 25,000 students to participate in the program. She said without inclusion into the program, private colleges would lose students to UNC system.
“It’s a great program,” Williams said. “We would just like to be a part of it.”
UNC President Erskine Bowles and North Carolina Community College System President Martin Lancaster focused on discussing what they liked about Easley’s budget request as well as what they would have preferred to have been funded.
For Bowles, that meant a strong plea for funding the UNC system’s request to improve salaries to the 80th percentile among peer institutions. Currently, the system is at the 50th percentile, Bowles said.
UNC had requested $43.8 million for both the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years for this initiative. Easley provided no funding for it in his budget request. Bowles said the funding is needed to provide competitive salaries for faculty members to offset future losses to retirement.
“We have got to bring great faculty to the university,” Bowles said. “I ask if you don’t fund anything else in our budget, fund our request for faculty.”
Bowles also advocated the creation of a competitiveness fund, another priority of the system that the governor had not included. The UNC budget request was $15 million in both 2008 and 2009. According to the request, the fund would support “strategic investments in emerging areas of importance to the economic competitiveness of the state.” Bowles said the program is similar to ones in California, Arizona, Georgia and New York, and that Oklahoma recently created a $50 million fund. With the fund, said Bowles, the state “can create the jobs of tomorrow in North Carolina.”
Martin Lancaster wanted more funding for technical and vocational education programs. Seventy-five percent of all community college students are enrolled in these types of programs, he said, yet the governor left out a request of $7 million by the community colleges to increase their capabilities.
“We have abandoned technical and vocational education,” Lancaster said. “We are not doing what we should in technical and vocational education.” Sen. Harry Brown, R-6, is expected to introduce a bill that would provide technical and vocational education as an option in high school curricula.
Lancaster also advocated for a testing program in high schools to address remediation of basic skills. Currently, 48 percent of community college students enter needing to take some form of remediation, at a cost of $30 million, Lancaster said.
The system proposed a $500,000 testing program that would allow students to assess themselves and then be provided the opportunity to take remediation in high school. Lancaster said the program is based on a program at Asheville-Buncombe Technical College that he said has had a “dramatic impact” on students.
Gov. Easley did not include funding for assessment testing in his budget.