CHAPEL HILL – One of the biggest challenges for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is to maintain its momentum in areas of excellence while focusing on preparing students for careers of the future.

“Every university right now has some number of challenges that they’re faced with,” Interim Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz says in the accompanying video. “And right now for us, I think it’s making certain for us to maintain our status as the leading global public research university.”

Guskiewicz also stresses that any student who is qualified should be able to go to Carolina.

“We want to be sure that we can provide opportunities for every applicant who wants to really be here, who’s qualified to be here, that might not be able to afford to get here. We are maintaining a real focus on accessibility and affordability,” he says.

Students from underrepresented families and communities, for example, should have the same study-abroad opportunities as students from affluent families, Guskiewicz says.

“We need to provide the funding for them,” he says. 

“And so we’re working really hard through the Campaign for Carolina – we’re raising over a billion dollars for what’s called the Carolina Edge. This is our Covenant Scholars program – with that Carolina Covenant program, the goal there is to provide opportunities for students from low-income families to graduate debt-free. Our Blue Sky Scholars program is for middle-income students. 

“We’re raising a lot of money to provide those opportunities for students to be able to get the experiential education opportunities – not just to study abroad, but also for internships, and for the opportunities to study alongside our world-class faculty in research labs,” Guskiewicz says.

“If we’re going to prepare students for the careers of tomorrow – if you think about it, those that graduated this past May, they’ll be retiring around the year 2069. So what jobs will be out there in year 2069?” he asks.

“We have to continue to stay at the forefront of preparing them for those jobs, and a lot of that comes through experiential education,” he says.

This will include areas such as helping students develop skills to think critically, work collaboratively, make reasoned judgments based on facts and respond creatively to changing and uncertain situations.

“That’ll be a challenge. It’s gonna cost money to do this,” Guskiewicz says.

“We have to make sure our legislature knows the value of a Carolina education, but yet what it costs to hire and retain the very best faculty in the world that we have here. 

“So those are some of the challenges that we’re faced with.”