The Facts: The general assembly included a provision in this year’s budget bill that increases UNC System tuition rates. At N.C. State, students will now pay $200 more in tuition each year. The costs to students may also include required healthcare and a student center fee by the end of the year.

Our Opinion: Student Government, the University’s legislative liaisons and the general assembly must recognize the burden this tuition increase places on students, especially those who are least able to pay for it. The general assembly must repeal the increase when it reconsiders the budget later this year.

The North Carolina General Assembly and Gov. Bev Perdue must have cringed when they started looking at the state’s yearly budget projections in January. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and serious cuts were going to be necessary across every nook and cranny of the state.

Over the summer, as the budget process revved up, our lawmakers realized that they might be facing a budgetary shortfall anywhere between $2 billion and $4 billion.

One of the solutions the groups came up with was a tax on the state’s residents in the form of a UNC System tuition increase. The appalling rise amounted to 8 percent or $200 per student, whichever was lower, at all the system’s 16 schools.

When taken with the prospect of fee increases for the new Talley Student Center and mandatory student health care, many students, including some of Student Government’s leaders, think the total student tab may come to well over $500.

These changes are especially unfortunate, as they will have the strongest affect on those least able to pay for them; a side effect of the tuition increase, aside from the direct monetary impact to students, is that it will lessen the University’s ability to provide as much financial aid.

This is unacceptable and undoubtedly against the founding principles of North Carolina as listed in its constitution, which sets a goal of affordable quality education for the state’s residents.

Student Government leaders met last night to discuss the $200 increase and ways to see that the money comes primarily back to the University. This is an important task for SG officials and the University’s legislative liaisons, but must be put into perspective.

They must fight tooth and nail against the tax altogether. The increase over the next two years, which is expected to make the state $35 million a year, presents an unacceptable burden on students who in many cases will now be accumulating more debt whilst going out into a weak economy.

Student Government did not do enough this summer when the increase was still on the table, but it has a chance to make it up to the University’s students now by belligerently attacking these changes — it owes the University that much.

The state has to make up its budgetary gap from somewhere, but that place should not be from students — its future leaders.