UNCG's expansion into the Glenwood neighborhood could be a sign of a socioeconomic shift. Students who have opposed the plan talk about tuition being expensive and flat-to-declining undergraduate attendance and steeply declining graduate school attendance. The end result is that the university is shifting from being a blue-collar school to being North Carolina's second Public Ivy. It is completely within the realm of possibility that a decade from now that UNCG will be the place for Greensboro's elites to send their children when they are unable to get into Chapel Hill.
Three years ago during the unsuccessful attempt to save the popular wrestling program, a professor wrote to the News & Record that if the school were really feeling the brunt of statewide budget cuts that UNCG would have saved money by taking the Spartans back to Division III. However, there is a big problem: As I read in Once Upon a City, ex-mayor Jim Melvin pumped a lot of money into UNCG in the 1990s as the school was moving up to Division I. As a result, there's no way that UNCG is going to go back down--not when neighboring High Point University and Elon are in Division I.
You've hit the nail on the head!
ReplyDeleteFrom a practical standpoint, athletic scheduling would become an issue, too. There are something like 26 Division III schools in Virginia, for example, but only about a half-dozen in N.C., all of them far smaller than UNCG. The SoCon's geographic footprint makes travel pretty reasonable. But most of the D3 schools in state belong to the USA South Conference, whose footprint extends from Montgomery, Ala., north to Maryville, Tenn., and in northern Virginia almost to Maryland. Most if not all D3 travel is by bus or van, which means additional time away from class for student-athletes.
ReplyDeleteNone of these points is an argument against UNCG's returning to D3, but they do illustrate that what would appear to be a simple financial argument for doing so isn't actually that simple.