Stepping into the UNC-Chapel Hill Student Recreation Center is a little bit like stepping back in time.
Students have . At the busiest times, students report waiting 10-deep in a line to use one of the exercise machines, or the free weights.
The last several student body presidents at UNC-Chapel Hill 鈥� including Jaleah Taylor 鈥� have run on and lobbied for a better rec center.
"We really think that if students are able to work out and practice wellbeing then they're able to flourish and be better students at UNC," said Taylor, a senior from Charlotte.
Taylor even has an idea for how to pay for it. "We could see tuition and fees really stepping in and kind of being the key funding allocation," she said.
But tuition revenue at UNC-Chapel Hill 鈥� and all universities in the UNC system 鈥� has been flat for nearly a decade. And beyond workout facilities, that revenue could have been used to possibly lower class sizes and even save academic departments on some other campuses.
Tuition freeze is a double-edged sword
Since 2017, the UNC Board of Governors has prohibited public universities from raising tuition for in-state undergraduate students. UNC System President Peter Hans regularly touts the tuition freeze as integral to the System's mission to make college affordable for everyone.
"Low tuition is our most basic public trust," Hans said at a recent BOG meeting. "You simply cannot expect people who work hard putting food on their kitchen tables to support universities if they are priced like luxury goods."
Tom Harnisch is a vice president at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, a national coalition of higher education policy leaders. He said only a handful of public university systems have , and North Carolina has one of the longest-running tuition freezes in the nation.
"It's great to see a tuition freeze going on now for nine years," Harnisch said. "Students really benefit from that. They come out with less student debt."
In 2018, 61.2% of NC public university students graduated with student loan debt, according to the UNC System. That number dropped to 49.9% in the 2023-24 school year.
But while the UNC BOG was keeping tuition flat year after year, inflation has soared. According to the , costs today are 1.31 times more expensive than they were in 2017.
When the UNC BOG was set to vote on the tuition freeze last year, multiple members questioned how long the board can continue asking universities to maintain the same quality of education with less funds.
鈥淚t appears on the outside looking in, we鈥檙e asking our institutions to hold themselves harmless from the outside market impact forces,鈥� Joel Ford said at a previous BOG meeting in 2023. 鈥淥ur institutions are having to essentially tighten their belts, find efficiencies, make adjustments in order to stay in line with their flat revenue stream.鈥�
This year, every member of the BOG voted to continue the freeze, and no one spoke up to raise concerns.
'It depends on what you get for your money'
North Carolina's public universities use tuition to help cover faculty and staff salaries, student services like libraries, academic support, and other "critical needs."
Sandy Baum is a higher education finance researcher at the Urban Institute, a DC-based think tank, who focuses on college affordability and student debt. She said when administrators force tuition freezes, the hope is universities will find ways to become more efficient with less, but that's rarely the case.
To compensate, universities might expand their class sizes, cut back on support services like tutoring or library services, , and 鈥� all of which Baum said comes at the cost of students.
"There are trade-offs between charging enough and providing institutions with enough tuition revenues for them to provide a quality education," Baum said. "Whether college is affordable doesn't just depend on how much it costs 鈥� it depends on what you get for your money. We have to be very careful about starving colleges and universities so they can't provide quality education."
While the UNC BOG kept tuition flat, peer universities in other states raised their sticker price.
At the University of California System, tuition was $11,502 in 2017 and has grown to $13,602 in 2025. The University System of Georgia kept tuition flat six out of the eight past years, but due to growing costs. The Board of Regents voted to raise tuition by 2.5% for the 2024-2025 school year.
The last time the UNC BOG raised tuition, it increased from an average of $4,464 to $4,553. If they had kept up with just a 2% increase annually, today's average tuition would be about $5,331. That $778 tuition raise for in-state students would have generated around an additional $115 million in revenue for UNC system schools.
At least two universities in the System were in dire need of those funds.
'When budget cuts happen; flagships get a cold, regional colleges get pneumonia'
Last year, the chancellors at UNC Asheville and UNC Greensboro cut several programs, majors, and departments due to a lack of tuition revenue. UNCA was facing a budget shortfall of $6 million and UNCG had lost $22 million in five years after declines in enrollment.
Harnisch, the SHEEO executive, said regional universities tend to be particularly dependent on tuition and state funding.
"When budget cuts happen, flagship universities get a cold (but) regional colleges get pneumonia," Harnisch said. "It really hurts the regional colleges, because the students that they're serving are lower income, and they don't have the wealthy alumni base, the alternative revenue streams, and other advantages that a public flagship university might have."
'The uncertainty is huge'
The Trump administration is targeting institutions of higher education with massive cuts to research funding, creating fiscal chaos on campuses across the state, and country. It's led to, among other things, hiring freezes, rescinded graduate student admissions, and lab closures.
Baum said those aren't the only problems schools are going to be navigating.
"What's going to happen to federal financial aid for undergraduate students? No one knows," Baum said. "They've just fired almost everybody in the education department who administers these programs. The uncertainty is huge."
Here in North Carolina, this unprecedented level of fiscal uncertainty comes after nearly a decade of the in-state tuition freeze.
According to Hans, the state has stepped in during that time to make sure universities are well-funded.
"Since 2020, when I started in this role, in-state tuition has not budged, while state funding for the UNC System has increased by 32%," Hans said at a recent BOG meeting. "Twice the rate of inflation during those years鈥� That's the compact in action, the reason we enjoy both low cost and high quality."
The state also provides additional funding for NC Promise institutions, where students only pay $1,000 for tuition annually. The legislature subsidizes the difference between what a university's regular tuition rate would be and its actual NC Promise rate. This "buy down" rate ranges from about $1,300 to $7,500 per semester.
The state's other 12 universities don't have a "buy down" for keeping their tuition flat. How much funding these schools receive also fluctuates from year to year, making it hard for administrators to gauge exactly how much money they'll have to work with.
The UNC Board of Governors requires universities to meet several performance metrics 鈥� like graduating students on time and with less debt 鈥� to receive their full funding from the legislature. In the past, universities have lost millions of dollars due to lower enrollment.
鈥淥ur legislative leaders have made some tremendous important fiscal policy decisions that have put this state in quite honestly a surplus position,鈥� BOG member Joel Ford said at the prior meeting. 鈥淚'm not as confident that going into the future that this will be the case.鈥�
瓜神app reached out to Ford to see if he still has the same concerns. He did not reply to our request for comment.
North Carolina's tuition freeze is likely to stay in place for at least another year, as Hans has made it clear that he wants to continue keeping tuition flat for a full decade. That plan coincides with what many experts say will be a "fiscal cliff" for the state budget.
"(The flat tuition) can't stay that way forever," Baum said. "It seems like the fairest thing would be to have small tuition increases every year, so that it's divided sort of equally among students who go to college this year and next year and so on. I think most likely what's going to happen is that students aren't going to have all the opportunities that they would have had if tuition had been rising at a regular rate."
Back at UNC-Chapel Hill, the university鈥檚 Board of Trustees still haven鈥檛 voted on how to pay for the $120 million recreation center renovation.
The school may choose to do what UNC did to cover recreation center improvements on their campuses: raise student fees.
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