CHAPEL HILL (October 23, 2024) – Does the university Charles Kuralt labeled “The University of the People” need more people?

Even before he became permanent chancellor, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts appointed four working groups to study major issues facing Carolina:

• Enrollment;
• Engineering;
• Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI); and
• The university’s physical master plan.¹

UNC-Chapel Hill has seen a 9.6% increase in undergraduate and graduate enrollment since 2014, with 20,681 undergraduates and 11,553 graduate students in Fall 2023. But that lags the growth at many of its public peer institutions.²

In the accompanying video, Roberts says Chapel Hill’s growth hasn’t kept pace with the dynamic growth of the state.

“The state is growing extremely rapidly, as everyone who lives here knows and sees every day. Carolina hasn’t really grown very much,” he says.

“So every year, we enroll a decreasing percentage of North Carolina’s high school graduates. It used to be about 5 percent. Now it’s about 3-1/2 percent. … If we don’t do anything, that percentage will continue to decrease.”

NO DECISIONS have been made yet, Roberts says.

But the working group on enrollment planning headed by Rachelle Feldman, Vice Provost for Enrollment, recommended in a 42-page report that the university increase undergraduate enrollment by 5,000 students over the next 10 years – 2,500 in-state students and 2,500 out-of-state students.

That would require a “modest and gradual” change from the UNC Board of Governors to the university’s cap on out-of-state enrollment from 18% to 25% over 10 years, the report says.

As universities nationwide have grappled with declining enrollment prompted by reduced birth rates, the Board of Governors has relaxed out-of-state enrollment caps at other UNC System institutions in recent years.

Part of the reason for increasing out-of-state enrollment is financial – out-of-state students pay substantially higher tuition than in-state students. Yet Carolina has seen a 63 percent increase in applications from out-of-state students over just the last five years.

Under the proposal, tuition revenue from undergraduates would increase to $360 million by 2035, versus $250 million that’s projected for 2025. In contrast, increasing enrollment by 5,000 with the current 18% out-of-state cap would result in a net loss for eight years.³

“We want to be the University of the People,” Roberts says in the video. “We were founded to be the University of the People. We at least need to think about growing our enrollment to reflect the remarkable growth of our state.”

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¹https://chancellor.unc.edu/the-office/#chapter-4.
²https://chancellor.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1276/2024/09/UNC-Chapel-Hill-Enrollment-Planning-Working-Group-Report.pdf, pp. 7-8.
³https://chancellor.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1276/2024/09/UNC-Chapel-Hill-Enrollment-Planning-Working-Group-Report.pdf.