Schools across the UNC system are scrambling to absorb $414 million in cuts before students come back in August to find services and academics seriously affected.

The UNC Board of Governors doled out the cuts across the system schools, basing each school’s share of the cuts on criteria such as freshman-to-sophomore retention and availability of other funding sources.

But while some cuts might appear larger than others, such as the 18 percent cut to UNC-Chapel Hill, some of the system’s smaller schools are the ones who will take the hardest hits.

UNC-CH’s cut was the largest made by the Board of Governors, but that cut is actually the smallest proportionally at about 4 percent of the school’s $2.4 billion budget. State appropriations only make up for 21 percent of the school’s total budget.

At smaller schools like UNC-Pembroke, where state appropriations make up 47 percent of the budget, the 15 percent cut will account for 8 percent of the school’s total budget.

The cuts at Pembroke are severe. They’ll result in the loss of 52 faculty positions, or 15.7 percent of the school’s full-time faculty, according to the office of university and community relations.

The school will lose 220 class sections, and 4,793 scholarships will be reduced or eliminated. Eighty percent of UNC-Pembroke students receive financial aid, which is higher than the system-wide average.

Scott Bigelow, spokesman for UNC-Pembroke, said that the school did get hit harder than some of the other schools in the system, but that it wasn’t worth complaining about.

“The less whining you do, the more work you get done going forward,” he said. “We’re not going to wallow in it. Bottom line is, we got a lot of work to do and students will be back before we know it.”

Joni Worthington, vice president of communications for UNC General Administration, warned that comparing budget cuts to available non-state funding could be misleading.

“Many non-state revenues are legally restricted to the specific purpose for which they were received (e.g.,  research grants, dorm rents, student fees, restricted private gifts, etc.)  and cannot be diverted to backfill cuts in state funding,” Worthington said in an email.

For example, while UNC-CH’s budget is $2.4 billion, $803 million was tied up in research grants in 2010, according to UNC-CH’s Office of Sponsored Research Annual Report. Of that research funding, 73 percent is federal; 72 percent of that federal funding came from the National Institutes of Health.

James Moeser, who served as UNC-CH chancellor from 2000-2008, said that the cuts at Chapel Hill will affect undergraduate education.

“Federal grants are all targeted,” he said. “You can’t move that money any place else. Just to say that we have federal grant support that we can stand to take a $100 million hit over a $525 million (state) budget, all of which supports undergraduate education . . . it’s really targeted at undergraduates at Carolina.”

In his July 12 message to the campus community on implications of the budget cuts, Chancellor Holden Thorp said that effects felt by students will be worse this year than in years past, and larger class sizes and fewer course offerings in the College of Arts and Sciences are inevitable.