Tuition Increase Controversy

Tony Caravano recalls continued controversies involving tuition increases during his tenure as student body president, and his efforts to keep tuition affordable for NC State students.

Interview on 2011-11-04 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 Caravano: I mean we used the stories from Amanda-basically just to take a step back.
00:00:04.574 Quick: Personal Stories was the name of the book.
00:00:08.061 Quick: The Personal Stories Project.
00:00:10.774 Caravano: Personal Stories Project, yeah. So the tuition increases, you know there's an interesting role as a student body president.
00:00:16.770 You understand, or you come to understand,
00:00:19.946 the innards of this place, the guts of how it operates and works,
00:00:25.015 so I understood the need for additional revenue coming into the campus,
00:00:29.475 but at the time in North Carolina the middle class was just being squeezed
00:00:35.151 the students that had need, they were going to be covered, right? So like I was receiving financial aid, I was probably going to receive enough money to make this work.
00:00:44.293 Students whose parents could afford to just write the check at the beginning of the semester, they were going to be fine as well.
00:00:50.574 heir parents were going to help them afford it.
00:00:53.340 It was the students who were working to pay and the students' parents who were working to pay to get them there, that's who we were really worried about,
00:01:00.215 so that was the source of the opposition
00:01:03.319 Some of the trustees had a hard time with the increases because they understood that.
00:01:07.686 We made that really palpable for them by bringing real people and real faces in front of them
00:01:12.177 with the book that Amanda prepared and also just by bringing real people to those meetings.
00:01:16.371 So I think it was different. We didn't do the protests that some of our predecessors had done and the rallies,
00:01:22.966 those things hadn't yielded different results,
00:01:25.644 so we brought them to actual meetings to talk to the people who were going to make the decisions.
00:01:29.543 I didn't vote the same as the other trustees on those votes, I'm pretty sure,
00:01:35.280 but at least we had voiced our opposition in a way that I thought was articulate
00:01:40.188 and in a way that also gave us a lot of credibility for other issues
00:01:43.424 that came down the road later and then for years to come.