2 SC public colleges gave opposite tuition decisions to the same dad, costing him $27,500

COLUMBIA — In a state where lawmakers have put a priority on keeping tuition steady for South Carolina graduates, students from outside the Palmetto State pay two to three times more to attend a public college here.

Determining who qualifies as a South Carolinian can be complicated in one of the nation’s fastest-growing states. While state law governs who pays in-state tuition rates, each college decides whether an applicant meets them.

In at least one case, that discretion left siblings paying different rates to attend two different schools this year, despite having the same home address, their father told the SC Daily Gazette.

SC colleges have frozen tuition for several years. University presidents say that’s not sustainable.

That might lead to changes next year.

“If two schools are looking at the same law and coming to different conclusions on essentially the same situation, that’s something we need to take a look at,” said state Rep. Nathan Ballentine.

“Families shouldn’t feel like the answer changes depending on which public college their child chooses,” added the Irmo Republican, who chairs the House’s budget-writing panel for higher education. “If the law isn’t clear enough, then that’s something we as legislators need to address.”

Former Sen. Wes Hayes agrees. The Rock Hill Republican, who led education subcommittees in the Senate, has chaired the Commission on Higher Education’s governing board since 2018. The agency may need to take a closer look at its regulations or better train college finance offices on their implementation, he said.

The rules

The higher education agency sets the rules for who does and doesn’t qualify for in-state tuition. But state law gives colleges leeway to interpret and apply those rules, as well as handle all appeals from parents and students. The state agency cannot step in.

To qualify for the in-state rate, parents must show they have taken steps to become South Carolina residents and have lived in the state permanently for at least a year prior to the first day of class for the semester.

They have to get a South Carolina driver’s license or identification card.

They must file income taxes in the state.

They must register their vehicle here.

And they must have their primary residence in the state, either rented or owned. A second, vacation home does not count.

Carl Salvato said he met all of those criteria after moving from Texas to Charleston in August 2025. Plus, he registered to vote.

But when he applied this year to pay the in-state rate for his two children — a sophomore at Clemson University and a senior at College of Charleston — he got two different answers.

Clemson approved the lower rate for his son. But the College of Charleston denied it for his daughter, citing the home Salvato owned in the San Antonio area.

That decision will cost him $27,500 this school year.

The out-of-state rate means Salvato will pay nearly $40,000 this year for his daughter’s tuition, compared to $12,500 an in-state student would pay. Salvato’s application was among 344 residency change applications received by the College of Charleston last school year.

At Clemson, his son’s tuition fell from about $43,000 last school year, when he was considered out-of-state, to roughly $16,000 this year.

“They’re saying I’m not a resident of the state of South Carolina, which I am. I have a driver’s license. I raised my right hand and swore that I was not a citizen of any other state. I voted here. I filed a tax return,” Salvato said. “I don’t know what else says I’m a resident of the state more than that.”

The issue, as College of Charleston officials saw it, is that — for tax purposes anyway — he still legally claimed the Texas home as his primary residence. That designation didn’t go away until the house sold in March, seven months too late by their interpretation.

Closer to family

According to property tax records, Salvato and his partner bought a condo in downtown Charleston five years ago.

Salvato said they intended it as a second, vacation home. But after his son graduated from high school last year and chose to attend Clemson, he decided to make a permanent move closer to both of his children.

He expects they’ll make Charleston and Clemson, or possibly Greenville, home after graduating.

Salvato switched his driver’s license and vehicle registration to South Carolina in August 2025. Then, in January, he put his Texas home on the market.

But he was still getting a “homestead” property tax break on the Texas home, meaning it remained his primary home under Texas law.

If he wanted to pay in-state tuition this school year at the College of Charleston, he should have reported to Texas officials by August 2025 that his home there no longer qualified for a homestead tax break. That would have met South Carolina’s one-year primary residency requirement, according to the college.

“Based on current property records, your primary residential indicators appear to remain tied out-of-state,” Wesley Funsch, the college’s legal residency coordinator, wrote in a July 2026 email to Salvato.

So, College of Charleston denied his daughter a lower tuition rate for her senior year, even as Clemson gave his son the go-ahead.

“I applied. They denied it. I appealed. They denied it. I got my (state representative) involved. He talked to them. They still denied it,” said Salvato, who provided emails to the SC Daily Gazette.

Two different answers

Why Clemson came to a different conclusion is unknown. Clemson officials did not respond to questions from the SC Daily Gazette about it.

Rep. Tom Hartnett, the Mount Pleasant Republican whose district covers Salvato’s home on the lower peninsula, also did not respond to messages left by the Gazette.

But in an email to Salvato, he wrote: “On the surface, it certainly seems inconsistent that two state-supported institutions would treat children from the same family differently. The difficulty is that each school makes its own residency determination based on the information presented to it, and one school’s decision does not necessarily require the other school to make the same determination.”

Meanwhile, Funsch acknowledged Clemson’s decision in an emailed response to Salvato. But that didn’t change anything. Under state regulations, the school “must conduct an independent review based on the specific evidence and timeline submitted to our campus,” Funsch wrote.

A common standard

Like Texas, South Carolina also uses a property’s tax status to determine if a home is the owner’s primary residence.

In South Carolina, primary homes get lots of tax advantages: They’re taxed at a 4% assessment ratio (compared to 6% for vacation or rental property) and they pay zero in school operating taxes. And under South Carolina’s newly expanded “homestead exemption,” homeowners 65 and older pay no property taxes on the first $75,000 of the property’s value.

Legislators use the designation when screening candidates for college boards and other official positions that require a person to live within a certain area or district.

But those screenings also give candidates the opportunity, under oath, to answer questions and make their case. The college did not offer Salvato that in-person opportunity, he said.

According to the College of Charleston, appeals are reviewed independently by an appeals officer who makes a final decision and sends a letter to the applicant.

The rules for who pays in-state tuition rates, established by the state Commission of Higher Education and state law, say a student or their parent must have a “true, fixed, primary residence and place of habitation” in South Carolina.

“One may have only one legal domicile,” according to the definition in state law. “One is presumed to abandon automatically an old domicile upon establishing a new one.”

Each college has the legal right to determine if the rules are met.

There’s nothing in the College of Charleston’s application, the state’s regulations or on the agency website explicitly mentioning a home’s tax status. But a checklist from Clemson specifically states that if applicants own property outside of South Carolina, they should provide a copy of that state’s property tax records “verifying that you are not claiming homestead exemption in that state.”

Why Salvato’s Texas home wasn’t an issue for Clemson is unclear.

A costly decision

Salvato said he didn’t think to change the tax status on his Texas property before selling it. And he’s never sought primary residence status on the Charleston condo, which is taxed at the 6% rate for vacation homes.

The reason, Salvato said, is he co-owns the Charleston property with his partner, who still considers Texas home and has a main house there. Changing the tax status would cause problems for his partner.

Now the decision is costing him. He expects South Carolina to continue to be home for him and his children.

“My kids are of the philosophy that they want to stay in the town that they go to college in,” he said.

His daughter, an international business major, hopes to turn connections she’s made over the past three years into a job. And his son, who is studying engineering, sees himself working at one of the Upstate’s major manufacturing plants, such as BMW.

“He really likes the Greenville area because it’s close to the mountains and there’s some great lakes,” Salvato said. “It just works for him.”

Salvato says he intended to put the roughly $27,500 in savings toward helping his daughter get established after graduation in Charleston, a city where the median rent tops $1,700 a month, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (In Columbia, it’s about $1,200 and in Greenville it’s about $1,300)

“At the end of the day, we’re all trying to set our kids up to be as successful as they can be,” he said. “So, to save the money on tuition and help her with some of the other expenses that are to come would have been really nice.”