RALEIGH – We’ve had students marching on the General Assembly, professors and university executives whining about mean and clueless legislators, and newspaper editorial boards tugging their chins furiously as they allege a troubling turn away from North Carolina’s historic role in generously funding the state government’s institutions of higher education.

Pardon me for being underwhelmed, but the N.C. Senate’s 2002-03 budget would increase UNC system tuition by only 8 percent for in-state students, and 12 percent for out-of-staters. In the state’s community college system, an increase of $3.25 per semester hour – or 10.5 percent – would, according to the Senate, “be offset by federal and state financial assistance programs.”

Public college tuition in North Carolina is far too low, and would remain far too low under the Senate budget. As I have observed a number of times in this space, excessively low tuition really means a massive subsidy of university students and their families at the expense of the general taxpayers. The latter group, by the way, averages about $40,000 in household income vs. nearly $60,000 for the average family of a UNC system student and $80,000 for an incoming freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Modern-day liberals should be outraged at this egregious redistribution of income from the poor to the rich. Because most now reside on college campuses (I chose the word “reside” rather than “work” for a reason), they tend to clam up on this subject.

Another reason why low tuition is bad public policy is that it encourages overconsumption. We have too many students enrolled at four-year-schools that aren’t really prepared for college-level work. Only about half graduate within five years, and nearly 40 percent will never get a degree. You find similarly wasteful consumption in the community colleges, with gobs of students withdrawing from classes halfway through the term without a second thought.

Other states have used more rational systems for funding their colleges and universities, and have thus saved taxpayer money while investing more efficiently in valuable higher education. Now, it appears that North Carolina is out of step, again. Thursday’s Wall Street Journal had a story on tuition hikes that listed in-state tuition hikes ranging from 12 percent to 25 percent at institutions such as Ohio State, the University of Illinois, University of Tennessee, University of Washington, Kansas State, and the University of Minnesota.

North Carolina’s minuscule-tuition policy does not aid our economy, does not improve educational attainment (as the data clearly show), and imposes excessive cost on general taxpayers. In the Locke Foundation’s alternative budget, we proposed tuition increases approaching 40 percent. I’d settle for half that in a pinch, which is now.