UNC System enrollment reached an all-time high this fall. Will the trend continue?

More students are enrolled in North Carolina’s public universities this fall than ever before, an achievement UNC System leadership is applauding — but in the face of a looming “demographic cliff” and other headwinds, they are doing so cautiously.

Across the university system’s 16 college campuses, nearly 248,000 undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled this semester, an increase of more than 2% since last fall, according to information published by the UNC System office. Since the fall 2022 semester, total enrollment is up across the system by 3.5%.

“There are now more than 8,000 additional students pursuing a life-changing opportunity across our state than there were two years ago, and we should be enormously proud of that,” UNC System President Peter Hans said during his remarks at a September meeting of the Board of Governors, which sets policy for the state’s public universities.

The enrollment growth is spread across the state, with all 16 campuses seeing increases this year.

NC Central University, the historically Black university in Durham, saw the largest increase at 7.7%. Winston-Salem State University, also an HBCU, saw the smallest increase at 0.1%.

The increases mark a noticeable shift from recent years, in which enrollments decreased at a handful of campuses in the system.

In some cases, such declines led to significant budget shortfalls and corresponding academic program cuts last academic year. But at two universities most affected by those declines, UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, enrollment is now up 1.5% and 4.7%, respectively — a trend Hans called “an encouraging reversal.”

There are national trends that could affect the system’s ability to recruit and enroll students in the coming years, including a decline in the population of high school graduates.

“None of us are taking a victory lap after one year’s positive enrollment numbers,” Hans said at the September meeting.

Now, system leaders are tasked with heading off those potentially adverse impacts, and they say they’ve got the plans to do it.

Looming demographic cliff

One of the most talked-about trends in higher education in recent years is the impending demographic or enrollment cliff — the idea, supported by projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, that the country is likely to reach a peak of high school graduates around 2025. Then, the population of traditionally college-aged people will shrink and stagnate for several years.

In North Carolina, specifically, there is little growth among the 18- to 24-year-old population expected over the next two decades, Hans told the Board of Governors two years ago. The state Office of Budget and Management has projected that the population of 18-year-olds in the state, specifically, would increase by 1.3% between 2022 and 2025, but then begin to decrease after that period.

Though North Carolina remains one of the country’s fastest-growing states, the population — here and across the country — is aging . The state’s birth rate is also declining, falling from 14.4 births to 11.4 births per 1,000 residents since 2007.

Those trends pose a significant dilemma for universities, which have largely and historically relied on college-going high school graduates to fill the seats in their classrooms.

The UNC System’s funding model for universities is no longer as firmly tied to the campuses’ enrollment growth, as was previously the case before the Board of Governors changed the policy a couple of years ago. But enrollment and student credit hours are still factors in how much state funding the campuses receive, and major declines in the student population at a given school can lead to significant budget issues — as was the case at UNCG and UNCA last academic year.

As Hans described the dilemma two years ago, “the pool of traditional college students in this state isn’t getting any deeper any time soon, and that has major implications for our universities.” Hans reiterated those implications to the board this September, reminding them that both the approaching demographic cliff and the declining birth rate are “real” issues and “quite measurable.”

“So the head winds will remain strong,” Hans said. “And we don’t measure the health of our public universities in a single snapshot, but over decades.”

But Hans said he is “encouraged” that the UNC System has been “clear-eyed about our challenges, strategic about where we’re investing and executing on the priorities we identified years ago.”

System’s plans to keep enrollment up

Hans outlined those priorities, and the progress the system has made on them, as:

▪ Keeping tuition flat for eight years in a row, and potentially longer. Hans said last year he would like the Board of Governors to keep tuition costs stable for an additional two years, which would make a full decade.

▪ Simplifying financial aid, including with the Next NC Scholarship , which covers at least half — if not more — of tuition and fees for students from families with an annual income of $80,000 or less. The scholarship, which combines the federal Pell grant and state-funded financial aid, officially launched last year “at an especially important moment,” Hans said, as major delays and glitches plagued the federal financial aid process and “created enormous uncertainty for families.”

▪ Building an online learning platform for adult learners. Project Kitty Hawk — a nonprofit entity that is affiliated with the UNC System, but operates independently — provides technology that allows universities within the system to offer online classes geared toward nontraditional adult students, including those who started college but did not earn a degree.

The effort, funded with $97 million in COVID-19 relief money, was originally projected to enroll nearly 31,000 students by the end of 2028. But the company has since downsized its projections to expect a little less than half of that amount to enroll by the same time. Still, nearly 2,800 students who had some college credits, but no degree, are reenrolled at a UNC System school this fall through the effort, which Hans said had “a meaningful impact on this year’s enrollment gains.”

By enrolling more adult students, either through Project Kitty Hawk or other efforts, the university system could head off some impacts of the decline in the state’s high school-aged population.

▪ Enrolling more out-of-state students at several universities, including the system’s historically Black colleges.

Historically, the state’s public universities have been restricted to enrolling first-year classes with no more than 18% of students from outside of North Carolina. But in recent years, the Board of Governors has allowed several universities to raise that cap — to the point than just five of the 16 campuses still adhere to the 18% rule, and the others are capped between 25% and 50%.

The change “has brought much-needed talent to our state and much-needed investment to our institutions,” Hans said.

▪ Making the transfer process easier for students entering the UNC System from community colleges or other four-year schools, including by creating nearly 1,400 “transfer guides” for those students that launched this fall.

▪ Pushing students to graduate on-time, with campuses incentivized to do so through t he model that determines how much state funding they receive each fiscal year.

▪ Promoting the return-on-investment that students receive by earning a degree through the system. A two-year study, funded by the state legislature and released last fall, found that students who complete bachelor’s degrees in the UNC System earn, over their lifetime, a median of about $572,000 more than North Carolinians without a degree.

The study also found that that 94% of undergraduate programs and 91% of graduate programs in the system provide a positive return on students’ investments.

Hans also cited the Board of Governors’ repeal of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the UNC System as a priority. The policy change, which eliminated all DEI offices across the system and eliminated dozens of jobs in related areas, sends “an important message that our public institutions are not the exclusive home of any one party, faction or viewpoint, but genuinely do belong to all North Carolinians,” he said.

The impacts of DEI bans on enrollment across the country remain somewhat unclear, but some supporters of DEI fear that eliminating the efforts could impact universities’ ability to enroll and retain students from underrepresented minority groups.

Per the UNC System policy that replaced the former DEI mandate, most of the money North Carolina’s public universities previously spent on DEI efforts has been redirected to “student success” efforts, with the goal of improving retention and graduation rates, among other goals.

Hans said the efforts and priorities he listed to the board “are not one-off initiatives” to keep enrollment up.

“They add up to a real, long-term strategy to meet our core mission in a changing world,” Hans said. “Providing affordable, meaningful opportunity to the people of North Carolina when and where they need it — that’s the business we’re in, that’s our mission and that’s the overarching focus of our efforts.”