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Saturday, June 24, 2006

The Wilmington Star
Also Does the Math


[For an earlier calculation, see this post.]



'YOU SUBSIDIZE COLLEGE ATHLETES

North Carolina taxpayers will give more than $5 million next year to out-of-state students who come to North Carolina's public universities on scholarship. Most will be athletes.

For example, UNCW is expected to get 25 scholarship students under the program. Twenty three are athletes. They will cost North Carolina taxpayers roughly $248,375.

The Honorables created this subsidy last year to please one of the richest political action committees in Raleigh. Its members lobby for what they believe are the best interests of UNC-Chapel Hill - particularly its athletic programs. Boosters were sick of paying rising out-of-state tuition for athletes.

The providers of academic scholarships, notably the Morehead program, also were fretting because their money was covering costs for fewer out-of-state whiz kids. (They're imported to improve the student body's intellectual muscle tone and possibly stay in the state after they graduate.)

So the new law allows our public universities to admit more out-of-state scholarship students - forget the 18 percent cap on out-of-state admissions - and to charge in-state tuition to the organizations that finance their scholarships.

At Chapel Hill, because of the Morehead program, 61 of these scholarship winners will be ordinary students. Thirty-nine will be students who - it is fervently hoped - can sack opposing quarterbacks or hit three-pointers with two defenders in their faces.

Across the system, 145 students will get scholarships for academic reasons. Three hundred and eleven will get them for athletic ones.

The UNC Board of Governors opposed the law. But the Honorables knew better.

Their generosity will cost us about $5.2 million next year, and more in the future.

Might as well go to that ball game. You're paying handsomely to hire the players.'