CHAPEL HILL A planned tuition increase at UNC Chapel Hill is meeting some opposition from students who want more say in the process.

About a dozen students toting protest signs attended a board of trustees committee meeting Wednesday. They had not signed up in advance and were not allowed to speak.

They may try again this morning when the full board considers the tuition and fee increases.

“We’re against the fact that students are left out of the process,” said Laurel Ashton, a sophomore from Asheville. “And we know there is money out there. we want to know why it can’t be reallocated so tuition won’t be increased.”

Ashton said students want more information on budget cuts and a role in the tuition planning process.

Students serve on the committee that gave Chancellor Holden Thorp tuition proposals to review earlier this semester. The university also has maintained and consistently updated a Web site with reams of budget information.

It isn’t enough, Ashton said.

“I’ve been to that Web site a lot and have left feeling I really didn’t get enough information,” she said. “There’s not one place that really lays out what departments have been cut, which people have been laid off.”

Thorp has recommended a tuition increase of $200 for all in-state students. Out-of-state students would get hit harder: a $1,127 increase for undergraduates and a $732 increase for graduate students. Fees for all students would rise $96.01.

The larger increase for nonresident students has created some discontent, but campus and UNC system leaders have long viewed those students differently than North Carolinians. Tuition for out-of-state students has often been set with market and competitiveness data used as guidelines.

“I don’t feel we have the same obligation to keep tuition as low as practicable for out-of-state students as we do for in-state students,” UNC system President Erskine Bowles said recently.

Still, out-of-state students pay far less than they might elsewhere.

This year, nonresident undergrads pay $23,513 in tuition and fees to attend UNC Chapel Hill. Four of the public universities to which it is most often compared – UCLA, UC-Berkeley, the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan – all charge nonresidents at least $8,000 more. Michigan charges out-of-state students $34,937 this year in tuition and fees.

The whole conversation may be largely moot.

The 2009 General Assembly has already set rates for 2010-11 that will raise in-state tuition $200 or 8 percent, whichever is less. that decision trumps anything on the campus or UNC system level, but Bowles said last week that legislative leaders are willing to listen to other tuition proposals.

If the General Assembly’s edict holds, all tuition revenue raised would go into the state’s general fund. If it decides next year to adopt a university tuition plan instead, revenue raised would be used for campus needs, and half of it would be set aside for financial aid.

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