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Brandyn Jordan should be taking the graduate school entrance exam or applying for jobs.

Instead, the 22-year-old is working two jobs so he can return to N.C. A&T in the spring. Finances forced Jordan to sit out the last semester of his senior year.

“I was ready to get out. I thought I was ready to go,” said Jordan, an interdisciplinary studies major from Detroit.

“Things happen.”

Jordan isn’t alone. Some UNC campuses have reported there are more students who did not return to school this semester because they lacked the money.

Nationally, average tuitions and fees increased this year more than 8 percent among public, four-year schools, according to recently released data from the College Board.

At the same time, some sources of financial aid have dwindled, and students are taking on more debt to pay for their educations.

UNC’s governing board will discuss tuition this week. Board members won’t decide how much to raise costs until February. But discussion about financial aid, tuition charged at the system’s peer schools, and challenges at UNC schools in the face of $1 billion in cuts over the past five years could all influence that final number.

The system must find a way to continue to provide a quality education at an affordable price, UNC Board of Governors Chairwoman Hannah Gage said during a meeting last month.

“I don’t think anyone in this room wants to look back in 10 or 20 years and have people point to this time as being when one of the greatest systems in the country began to decline, began a great slide,” Gage said.

Student exodus

It was June, and there were more than 900 UNCG students eligible to return for the fall semester who had not yet enrolled, said Steve Roberson, the university’s dean of undergraduate studies.

Roberson’s staff contacted them all by email, urging them to re-enroll. By mid-August, that number had dwindled to 330, which Roberson said was still higher than in previous years.

Those students got phone calls, and what UNCG staff heard from many of them was much the same: They didn’t get enough financial aid or a parent had lost a job.

“We found from many of those students that they were not coming back because of financial circumstances,” Roberson said. “All of the people that we called were students who were eligible to return, who were in every other way doing well in school.”

Another 170 started the semester but dropped out — about twice the number that had dropped out this time last year, Roberson said. About 60 percent of those students also said finances played into their decision to withdraw, he said.

Others left to pursue a cheaper path to their educational dreams: community college.

Dreams deferred

Getting a bachelor’s degree in nursing was always the plan for Taylor Nahoum.

Nahoum’s parents — her father is a trucking company supervisor and her mother a pharmacy technician — earn too much money for the 19-year-old Thomasville native to get need-based financial aid.

She borrowed to enroll as a freshman at UNCG last year. She chose the school because she liked the campus and it was close to home.

By the end of spring semester, Nahoum was behind on the nursing school track. She enrolled in summer classes at Davidson County Community College to get ahead, with the intention of returning to UNCG in the fall.

“And then I saw how cheap it was going to be,” Nahoum said.

Nahoum saw that  she could get her nursing degree quicker; she’s already applied to nursing school. And while she’s still borrowing to pay for school, it’s a lot less than if she had stayed at UNCG.

“It would have been ... 10 or 11 more thousand dollars per year if I would have lived over there (at UNCG).”

Nahoum still plans to get her bachelor’s degree.

It’ll just come a little later than she hoped.

“It was hard,” Nahoum said of her decision to leave UNCG, “but it was for the best, I think.”

Burden of borrowing

Many students who aren’t sidelining their dreams of a four-year degree are digging themselves deeper into debt to pay for it.

Students who graduated with loans in 2010 owe an average of more than $25,000, an increase of 5 percent from the previous year, according to a report released last week by the Project on Student Debt at the Institute for College Access & Success in California.

The average student debt in North Carolina was nearly $21,000, according to the report. At A&T, graduates carried a debt load of more than $21,000; at UNCG, it was nearly $24,000.

Roberson said UNCG students borrowed about $76 million in federal loans this year, up from $74 million last year.
UNCG parents borrowed $16.5 million in federal loans, compared to $12.9 million last year, he said.

“The indebtedness just    keeps rising,” Roberson said.

Working to learn

Jordan, who was to graduate in December, works part-time at a shoe store and full-time at a grocery store distribution center to make enough money to pay for school. Neither he nor his mother could get approved for additional loans so he could enroll this semester, he said.

Having lived off campus for more than a year, Jordan is hoping to be approved for in-state residency tuition, which would ease his financial burden.

“Things’ll get better. It’s a temporary situation, so I’ve just got to keep on moving,” he said. “I’m just ready to get back in school, truthfully. I think once I get back in school, I’ll be OK.”

Wanda Lester, A&T’s associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, said there were more than 1,100 students who were academically eligible to return in the fall but didn’t.

Of that number, the university determined that about 357 received financial aid in the spring, but fell short of the academic criteria to keep their aid for the fall term, said A&T’s financial aid director Sherri Avent.

Lester couldn’t say for sure why the others didn’t return. She said A&T will follow up, including trying to determine whether the students enrolled at another institution.

'Cuts Hurt’

As colleges struggle to hold onto students, the resources they have to do so are becoming scarce.

The UNC system was hit with $414 million in cuts this year, which affected most aspects of campus life, including the classroom.

“We have fewer class sections and, consequently, larger class sizes,” UNCG’s Roberson said. “We have fewer faculty per student, and the ability for us to provide resources to educate and retain get diminished by every single cut that we take.”

And once a student leaves, it’s not always easy to get them back.

“People intend to come back,” said Atul Bhula, president of the UNC Association of Student Governments. “They don’t necessarily come back, and that’s what scares me more than anything else.”

Bhula, a graduate student at Appalachian State, has visited campuses across the state and heard the stories of students who have been forced to abandon their studies.

These are stories he and other student leaders want state legislators also to hear.

Bhula said the association this month will kick off a campaign called “Cuts Hurt.” He said campuses will compile the “raw, personal” stories of students who have been affected by budget cuts. The videos will be posted on the association’s website, Bhula said.

Roberson said the decreasing state and federal support for schools make it a frightening time in higher education.

It’s a concern on the minds of many. Colleges are doing everything they can to meet the needs of students, Roberson said, but their ability to do so is clearly limited.  

“Nobody has yet proposed a way out of this,” he said.

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 373-7080 or jonnelle. davis@news-record.com