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. 

A new national report card from a higher education thinktank is sounding some ominous tones for the future of American higher education, and has given North Carolina an "F" for college affordability.

That failing grade may seem odd to folks in North Carolina, where the public university system has long fought to keep tuition low and an affordable college education is actually guaranteed by the state's constitution.

But in failing on affordability, North Carolina is far from lonely. The report card from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education issued an "F" to every state except California, which ruined the perfect sweep with a "C-." 

The report says higher education in North Carolina has gotten less affordable over time. Even as the state devotes more money to need-based financial aid, it isn't enough to keep up with the rising expenses faced by working families, the report states.

Hannah Gage, who chairs the UNC system's Board of Governors, told me this morning that while North Carolina's public universities are still a good deal when compared to counterparts in most states, greater attention should perhaps be paid to the financial situations facing the families trying to send their children to college now.

"If middle-class income levels have flat-lined over the last several years, it may have changed their ability to pay," she said.

Here's a link to a site that breaks the report down state by state.

And attached to this blog, you'll find the pdf to the in-depth North Carolina report.

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