A change in law last summer led UNC-Chapel Hill to inadvertently admit too many out-of-state students.

The result, a $158,000 reduction to its budget.

That's how the UNC system rule on out-of-state freshmen works. No more than 18 percent of a public university's freshman class can come from outside North Carolina. If a campus exceeds that ceiling two years running, it gets sanctioned.

Carolina missed twice, thus the fine, as explained here.

But the twist in the story is that it only exceeded the cap after a group of out-of-state athletes headed to the university who up until last summer would have been counted as in-staters had a change in status thanks to a legislative decision.