From the weekend - a story about how big-time athletics intersects with academics.

When UNC won the national basketball title last year, the folks who run the university's financial aid office may have cheered loudest.

Here's why - Universities get royalties from the sale of licensed merchandise. The more stuff you sell, the more money you get, and when a school wins a national title, sales explode.

At Carolina, the money goes to scholarships, creating a direct connection between athletic success and access to higher education.

Here's the story. 

As state leaders grapple with the budget, UNC system students remain in flux. They're receiving tuition bills this month, but they may need to pay again in a month or two.

That's the crux of our story this morning, which looks at why public university tuition, set in March by the UNC system's Board of Governors, may be scrapped in favor of higher rates. 

The economy has had a dramatic effect on the college admissions and financial aid processes. Consider this example: At UNC Chapel Hill, 13 percent more students applied for aid this year than did last year. And students applied on time, suggesting they're taking the aid process more seriously. (Thanks to Shirley Ort at UNC-CH's aid office for these details.)

The pdf attached to this blog entry illustrates tuition and fee rates for 2009-10 for undergraduates at all public universities, as approved in March by the UNC system's governing board.

Other information related to tuition can be found here.

Remember, those rates can changed by the legislature; the N.C. House has already proposed doing so.

Documents:

In the fall of 2004, 224 new students enrolled at UNC Chapel Hill as the first group of Carolina Covenant scholars. 

The Covenant program, unveiled with great fanfare the year before, was a news-making, groundbreaking initiative aimed at getting more low-income students into college and keeping them there. Dozens of other universities, surely seeing the avalanche of good publicity UNC-CH was receiving, quickly followed suit.

Four years later, the graduation numbers are in. 

Of those Covenant students who enrolled in 2004, 137 of them, or 61.4 percent, have graduated on the traditional four-year timeline for undergraduates.

By way of comparison: 2,678 of the 3,588 students in the overall freshman class that year graduated in four years. That's 74.6 percent.

So what does that mean? Shirley Ort, the university's scholarships and student aid director and architect of the Covenant plan, said this:

"It shows what we have known, that the academic performance of low socio-economic students is not as great as higher-income students,." Ort added that these students are often coming out of poor school districts or are the first in their families to go to college and are thus often not as well-prepared as other students.

But you can flip this data around as well and look at it another way. In crunching the numbers, UNC also compared the Covenant students to a control group of students from 2003 who were of similar income levels but were not in the Covenant program. Just 56.7 percent of those students graduated in four years, suggesting, perhaps, that the Covenant program, which offers significant academic and social support, helps get students across the finish line.

"I do believe that," Ort said. "I think it's the personal touch, the mentoring, and the engaging with faculty."

UNC-CH puts a great deal of money, energy and resources into making sure the Covenant scholars succeed. Read more about that here. 

One last note: the Covenant students who didn't graduate in four years are largely still enrolled and on track, Ort said. Proof? The program's retention rate is 94 percent, meaning all but about six percent of the students who started the program back in 2004 have either graduated or are still enrolled.