In early December, a national report flunked North Carolina and all but one other state on higher education affordability.
UNC system and campus officials were not amused. They questioned the methodology of the report, titled "Measuring Up," a product of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. They called it "vague" and criticized it for grouping North Carolina's public and private institutions together in judging the state's afforability on higher education.
Just this week, UNC system President Erskine Bowles took the report to task in a letter to the editor of this newspaper. He called the report's affordability grade "misleading" and spent several paragraphs recounting the university system's many successes in building a formidable pool of financial aid money and increasing access to the state's students.
I say all this to explain why I got a chuckle this week during a presentation by UNC system leaders that focused on tuition, fees and budget cuts. The 39th page of a long Powerpoint presentation was one of those braggin' slides, a ranking of all 50 states showing that in two years, North Carolina rose from the 10th most affordable state for higher education in the country to the fourth most affordable.
That's good data. The source? The very same report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that Bowles and others have criticized.
You can read the report here.
