How much is too much to pay for college? One student almost paid $30,000 to take a single class.

Students at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington haven’t protested much, beyond Facebook statuses and Tweets, about their raise in tuition and fees handed down by the UNC system this year. A couple hundred dollars more in loans, they thought. A few more payments when I graduate. An extra week working the night shift at the local laundromat, or fast food stop, or grocery store.

For Megan Kiger, a graduating senior who transferred to the creative writing program (CRW) at UNCW two years ago, it would have meant much more. An entire semester more.

Last spring, Kiger watched the classes she needed to graduate start to slip away from her on Seanet, the website that students use to register for classes. She waited days for her registration to begin, for her time slot to open up on the last day, Thursday, hoping she wouldn’t be too late. The class she needed, advanced fiction, was filling up fast.

“If I hadn’t gotten into the advanced class in the fall, I’d be here an extra semester,” said Kiger, “I watched the whole time. It was nerve-racking.”

Kiger’s decision to come to UNCW for its CRW program to finish her undergraduate degree was a big one. She’d gone to community college in New Jersey, her home state, for two years. She was on full scholarship there, through a program called the New Jersey Stars, and if she chose to go to a Jersey state school, the rest of her education would be free, too, based on her high grade point average.

Instead, she came here and paid out-of-state tuition, which totaled around $26,000 each of her two years at UNCW. Although she’ll get her diploma in May, she’ll graduate without the certificate in editing and publishing that she took several other classes for. She had one more class to take in the sequence required for the certificate. By the time she tried to register, it was full.

“It’s a little disappointing to me,” said Kiger. Her voice broke over the phone. There was a beat of silence.

“I took out the money. I came all the way down here for this program that I heard so much about, and there aren’t enough teachers, not enough classes, not enough open rooms,” she said.

The CRW program hasn’t hired a permanent staffer in five years, according to Mark Cox, a professor who served on the committee that brought up the elimination of the minor. The department depends on students of its highly ranked graduate program to assist in lecturing.

“We’re simply stretched,” said Cox, “We’re down many faculty members and the freshman class has been growing.”

The number of students in the program has been increasing steadily since it began in 2001. The faculty has become a team of Tetris players, trying to fit students into the little space they have, waiting for the bottom row to graduate.  But students were taking longer than four years, due to a lack of classroom space and professors to add more classes to a growing population of creative writing students. That bottom row isn’t disappearing, and there isn’t any room for new “blocks.”

So the department is eliminating the minor and changing the requirements of the major to make the program more selective.

Cutting the minor is the first official manifestation at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington of the budget cuts that schools across the UNC system, and country, are experiencing. But the administrators of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, including Philip Gerard, chair of the department, felt constricted long before, when the economy’s stream of education funding slowed to a drip.

“It doesn’t happen all at once. Our budget has been cut every year,” said Philip Gerard, chair of the department.

Tim Bass, coordinator for the BFA in creative writing, has an office in Kenan Hall. It’s in this room that he advises each major individually. His glasses are off, he’s got a five o’clock shadow and there’s an open soda can on the desk. Leaning back in his green chair, his gray eyes lift to the ceiling and he places the back of his fist on his forehead, undoubtedly searching for the words to explain why he’s cutting the program. 

“The major has gotten so popular, we can no longer handle the minors efficiently,” Bass said. “We’ve reached a point of saturation.”

Every seat is filled in required classes, which often have only a few sections available per semester. Advanced fiction, a class that all fiction track majors must get through for their degree, only has one section offered per semester. There isn’t a large enough faculty to teach any more sections. In the fall, that section is only open to 18 students. This spring, three seniors this year couldn’t get into the classes they needed to graduate on time, according to Bass, who had to manipulate their class schedule and provide course substitutions for them. Minors were taking seats in classes that seniors needed.

“If minors get in there, majors don’t,” said Bass. “Everything is connected. At some point they end up jeopardizing the graduation timetable of the majors.” The exact number of majors and minors changes daily since the online system for declaring reopened last week. Bass says the department is operating at capacity.

“We’ve gotten a slew of new students since that time,” said Bass. “We had 81 minors and about 180 majors a few weeks ago.”

Students who declared CRW as a minor already will continue with their classes to pursue the minor. They’ll be “grandfathered” in. There is no cutoff date for students to declare the minor; instead, the registrar determines eligibility based on dates of attendance.  Any student who has taken classes at UNCW before the 2012-13 school year begins can still declare and graduate with a minor in creative writing if all the requirements are met. This also applies to students transferring to UNCW this summer.

Each creative writing major has a concentration in fiction, nonfiction or poetry. The requirements for majors before the 2012-13 academic year consisted of four core classes: three consecutive courses in a concentration and the senior seminar, taken in the last semester. No two required courses can be taken during the same semester, since they build on each other.

Starting this fall, incoming freshmen and transfer students who want to major in creative writing will need to meet additional graduation requirements to the core courses. CRW 201 and 203, which were electives, will be required. The literature requirement in the major will increase from 15 to 18 credit hours, adding three hours of international literature coursework. There will also be a certain time span in which majors have to take a required class.

Some requirements will also be eliminated: majors won’t have to take three credits in fine arts beyond the basic studies, and university studies or higher level courses will now fulfill the six credit hours of additional concentration in humanities, social sciences or science courses.

The course of study for the last batch of creative writing minors is changing, too. Minors will be restricted from certain courses only available to the majors. Also, they’ll be able to fulfill some requirements with other university courses.

“No minor is prevented from completing the minor. They actually have more flexibility,” says Bass. When the last minor graduates, the majors will only compete with each other for classes.

But the majors are already competing with each other.

“Not only are there more students in fiction, but students from other sections like poetry and nonfiction often choose fiction courses when they have to take a course outside of their concentration,” said Lindsay McSwain, a creative writing minor.

McSwain wants to concentrate in fiction, but she can’t advance any further in fiction than she already has. Both the advanced fiction and editing for publishing classes are now reserved for majors. Like other minors might, she is considering dropping the minor altogether.

McSwain, like Kiger, was a transfer student. Many students who are paying for college themselves choose to transfer to a state university after two years to reduce the number of student loans they need to take out by half. However, in the creative writing major, transfer students are less likely to get the classes they need. All of the courses they needed to take freshman and sophomore year become courses they need in their junior year. All the courses for junior and senior year are moved up to senior year. Transfer students are half is likely to get the courses they need as those who start the creative writing track in their freshman year.

The creative writing program isn’t in the top ten in popular majors at UNCW and hasn’t been as far back as 2008. Other programs like psychology, the top program in 2011, and biology, usually in the top five, offer a minor. But many other programs, like communication studies and business, cannot offer minors due to the size of their programs and limited budgets.

The CRW program may have been hit the hardest because of how differently it works. According to Tim Bass, classes are designed for small group discussion, so students and professors can participate on the same level. Unlike other lecture-heavy programs of study, creative writing classes can’t be held in a large hall with a Powerpoint and clickers, the little devices that students use to key in their answers during lecture.

“It’s not practical to teach in big classes. It’s very small group oriented,” said Bass. But adding more small classes just isn’t in the budget.

“At this point in time, considering the budgetary constraints we are all facing, it was the most practical solution,” said Lavonne Adams, a senior lecturer and the Master of Fine Arts coordinator, “Several other programs with high enrollment numbers find that they are also unable to support a minor.”

Already, there are five students on the waitlist for advanced fiction for the fall. Jim Ellis, a creative writing major with three semesters left until graduation, is one of them. He’s a from South Carolina and pays out-of-state tuition. He always wanted to write fiction, but it seemed like a fantasy to him until his cousin-in-law graduated with a CRW degree from UNCW.  He was inspired.

In today’s economic recovery, many students are opting to study what they want to learn instead of what will land them a job after graduation. It may explain why the number of majors has increased in the past few years.

Ellis doesn’t think he’ll get into the class for fall, so he’s hoping to get into the class in the spring of 2013.  It’s the third class in the fiction concentration, and if he can’t get in, he won’t graduate on time unless he takes senior seminar at the same time.

“Taking advance fiction in my last semester seems ineffectual,” said Ellis, “I’d be just learning the skills I need to apply to my senior seminar.” Ellis couldn’t sign up for classes until the last day of registration. Even with the class restricted to majors only, the seats were all filled.

“I haven’t seen any positive change yet. There should be more openings for classes, but there haven’t been,” he says.

McSwain, Kiger and Ellis were all assigned the last day to register, despite their junior or senior status. Many majors harbor resentment towards students in the Honors College and athletes, who are allowed to register first, even if their GPA is lower than non-Honors students.

David Cordle, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, is disappointed to see the minor go but thinks it will make it easier for the department to have the courses it needs for majors.

“Creative writing is a very popular program, many more majors than we did just a few years ago,” said Cordle, “It’s unfortunate that we haven’t been able to grow the size of the faculty to keep up with that.”

This was the first elimination process that the college has seen, said Cordle. He wasn’t anticipating any other programs being cut in the near future.

No official announcement of the changes has been made to the current CRW students, via email or otherwise.