RALEIGH – I’ve been working feverishly this week to finish up the John Locke Foundation’s biannual briefing book, this time entitled Agenda 2004: A Candidate’s Guide to North Carolina Public Policy. Due out in early September, the 60-page document provides a couple of pages on virtually every issue you can think of – taxes, the state budget, education, health care, transportation, campaign-finance reform, local government, tort reform, crime, you name it.
And because its primary audience is current or prospective politicians, there are lots of pictures.
Drum roll.
Seriously, we do provide quite a few graphs, tables, and charts in the Agenda books, because they are designed to provide easily digested and used material on state and local issues. You can often put a lot of powerful information in a single image. For examples, you might visit the “Agenda 2002” section of JLF’s main website and check out some of the briefings.
One trend that leapt out at me as I was finishing things up this week is a table row that compares the share of North Carolinians with college degrees to the national average for college attainment. Over the past dozen years, this proportion has changed little – the proportion starts at 81 percent of the national college-attainment rate in 1989 and then goes up and down, ending up at 84 percent in 2002.
Why is that noteworthy? Because North Carolina spends more subsidizing its public colleges and universities than most other state governments do. We are below-average in the percentage of personal income taxed and spent on public schools but above-average in the percentage spent on higher education (add the two, and you find that North Carolina’s total effort at education spending is about average). Put another way, state appropriations per full-time-equivalent student in the University of North Carolina system average about $10,500 a year – higher than in many otherwise comparable states.
You’d think that all this effort at subsidizing higher education would have significantly boosted North Carolina’s college-attainment rate compared to the rate in other states. But you’d be wrong. Part of the problem is that while our state may induce more high-school graduates to attend public universities with low tuition and high subsidy, that doesn’t mean they are truly prepared for college-level work. Nearly half of UNC freshmen do not graduate within five years, and roughly 40 percent will never graduate.
The other dynamic is that, contrary to popular belief, college affordability is at nearly an all-time high. Both public and private colleges across the country have boosted their tuition in recent years, but few families actually pay this “sticker price” because of scholarships, institutional aid, and governmental financial aid. What North Carolina is essentially doing with its high-subsidy policy is transferring wealth from relatively poor taxpayers with high-school educations to relatively wealthier families with children at a UNC school. This is an indefensible policy.
And you can read more about it in Agenda 2004, coming soon.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.