Spellings's UNC plan: Hold tuition, comb data for efficiency

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Less than a year after taking leadership of the 17-campus University of North Carolina system, Margaret Spellings has a plan for making the state's public colleges more welcoming to rural and minority students, more affordable and more involved in their communities.

The budget and policy priorities seek "a more productive, data-driven, and accountable system of higher education," according to the spending outline approved by the university system's Board of Governors this month.

At the top of the priorities list is $28 million over the next two years for the people and hardware needed to dive into billions of bytes of warehoused spending and student data to fish out actionable, cause-and-effect information.

Spellings and her board want another $1.5 million over two years to collect new data on how our graduates fare in the working world after leaving one of the public universities and to gauge what attracts professors and other highly-educated people to UNC schools or prompts them to leave.

The strategy to lessen UNC tuition costs — the state constitution requires that it be kept as low as practical — depends on whether state legislators will make up the difference, or whether taxpayer funding will continue to diminish and be replaced by outside research grants and corporate support, said Appalachian State University history professor Michael Behrent, one of Spellings' critics.

[...] while academics joined with other state employees in receiving minimal pay raises for years, some of the chancellors running university campuses have received double-digit increases twice within the past 15 months, said Behrent, a state leader of the American Association of University Professors, which advocates for higher education faculty