A writer for the Conservative Hawk newspaper at UNC-Wilmington offers a modest proposal to address the university’s budget shortfall without resorting to tuition hikes:

At UNCW, the top 153 employees make $100,000 or more. After a quick calculator session using the StarNews Online database, I found that these 153 salaries total $18,972,300. What does that matter, you may be asking?

Well, the gem of this whole ordeal is that with the new tuition increase, they plan on increasing overall funding by roughly $940,000. Half of which would go toward financial aid and the other half to creating three new employee positions. Let me quickly touch on the financial aid portion. Does it make sense to ask every student to increase their loans next semester to turn around and give half of that amount back to other students? That, my friends, is redistribution of wealth, and another whole discussion. So, for argument’s sake, let’s say they truly need this $940,000, indisputably. This is where those 153 salaries come into place.

If you take the $18,972,300 and take just 5% of that, you would have nearly $949,000. That’s odd – because that is even more than they are anticipating through the tuition increase. So, if you just decreased the salaries of those making over $100,000 by 5%, this budget shortfall would be solved. This isn’t fair, though, right? Why should the employee make sacrifices? It should be the burden of the student, also known as the customer. The 20-year-old student, working part-time, going to school full-time, and STILL taking out loans. I mean, that’s only fair.

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