WENTWORTH, N.C. ― North Carolina community college leaders could decide whether to let schools tack a local surcharge onto student tuition as campuses search for money to upgrade equipment to train future workers for jobs in manufacturing and health care.
Campus presidents of the 58-school system will decide later this month whether to push for allowing individual community colleges to add a surcharge that could mean up to $256 a year more for a full-time student paying $2,432 in tuition per academic year.
A major reason is the schools’ mission to prepare North Carolina’s workforce for in-demand jobs, said Robert Shackleford, president of Randolph Community College in Asheboro. Two fields with the greatest demand are advanced manufacturing and health care, he said.
Those fields “are two of the most equipment intensive programs we can offer, which means it takes a lot of money,” said Shackleford, who heads the North Carolina Association of Community College Presidents.
Any decision on the surcharge would have to be approved by the state’s community college board.
Campuses are being driven at different speeds and different directions based on local economic environments, Shackleford said, thus the belief it might be best for each school to decide whether a surcharge was needed.
State spending on the 100,000-student community college system has risen 14 percent since 2007 to nearly $1.1 billion this year.
