For a Slot at a 4-Year University, Some North Carolina Students Could Soon Need a Community-College Degree

Spurred by language in the state’s 2015 budget, North Carolina’s public-university system is weighing a plan that would require its institutions to enroll some students only if they’re willing to go to a community college first.

With a report to state lawmakers due in early March, the idea is stirring uncertainty across a state in which the legislature and the university system have frequently been at odds in recent years.

The “NC Guaranteed Admission Program,” as the proposal is called, would require the universities to identify their least-qualified admitted students, route those students to community colleges, and guarantee those who earn associate degrees within three years admission as juniors. Officials with the university and community-college systems have been charged with devising ways to carry out such a program, which would start with students entering college in the fall of 2017, and presenting their findings and recommendations to lawmakers and other state officials by March 1.

Supporters of the program — including Republican lawmakers, several of whom pushed for its place in the budget, and the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank that has exerted a strong pull over policy in the state — say it is necessary to decrease student debt and improve the university system’s six-year graduation rate, which is 67.5 percent. That’s several points above the national average.

Most university chancellors and provosts are reserving comment on the program until the report to lawmakers is completed. “Everyone wants to do everything we can to ensure access on the part of students to a high-quality education at a reasonable price,” James W. Dean Jr., provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in an email. “Over the next few weeks and months, we will sort out whether this proposal is helpful in this regard.”

But faculty leaders are not holding their fire. They say the plan would cause logistical headaches for the universities, push weaker students into colleges with fewer resources, and send many prospective students out of state, resulting in harmful enrollment declines. The lawmakers who back the program have offered little guidance about how it would work, said Andrew G. Moretz, the university system’s vice president for government relations and chief liaison to the legislature.

A Lack of Specifics

Proposals for the deferred-admission plan have appeared in some form in North Carolina’s budget bills for the past three years. State Rep. D. Craig Horn, a Republican, said the idea had been inspired by a conversation among a group of lawmakers about how to mitigate student debt and improve graduation rates.

The lawmakers looked particularly at the bottom quartile of students who enrolled in the state’s public universities, Mr. Horn said, and realized that those students “had a terrible track record of graduation. So what are they getting for their money?”

For students from humble backgrounds, spending two years at a community college — and possibly saving $25,000 or more per year — would be a big deal, said State Sen. Tom McInnis, another Republican who has spoken in favor of the program. (Mr. McInnis is already familiar to faculty members in the state: He sparked an outcry last year by proposing a bill that would have mandated a 4/4 teaching load for all professors in the university system.)

Another benefit of two-year colleges, said Jenna A. Robinson, president of the Pope Center, is that their instructors “have spent more time and focused more on what remediation should look like.” (About 25 percent of the university system’s graduates are transfer students; more than half of those come from community colleges.)

The description of the guaranteed-admission program that made it into the 2015 Appropriations Act, House Bill 97, isn’t rife with specifics. It calls for a study of a program that would allow deferred students who complete an associate degree within three years to obtain guaranteed admission at the four-year institution to which they had originally applied. It also requires universities to reserve places for those students by reducing freshman enrollment for each academic year by the number of deferred students.

But the description doesn’t specify how many admitted students each campus should route to community colleges. The North Carolina House’s budget proposal last year initially required that at least 1,305 students participate in the program in its first year, and that the program should be effective for students entering college in the fall of 2016. The proposal also encouraged university and community-college officials to “increase the number of deferred admissions as appropriate.” That language did not appear in the final budget, enacted in September, which pushed the proposed start date for the program back to 2017.

Mr. Horn said he didn’t want to draw “a hard and fast line” to determine how many students should be deferred. That should be left up to the campuses, he said.

“This is not about a certain percentage or number per year,” said State Sen. David L. Curtis, a Republican, “but all students unprepared to do college-level work.”

‘We Need to Up the Game’

But how does one define who is least prepared? And who makes that determination? Those are two questions that Tony E. Graham, an associate professor in the School of Technology at North Carolina A&T State University, is asking.

Mr. Graham, who is president of the Faculty Senate at his university, also expressed concern that the program would disproportionately hurt the state’s minority-serving institutions by further reducing enrollment after several years of declines.

Another uncertainty: how campuses would reserve spots for students whose enrollment is deferred. Mr. Moretz, the university system vice president, pointed out that the plan would require the flagship campus, in Chapel Hill, “which has a 91-percent graduation rate,” to turn away even more students.

Would students admitted to four-year institutions be willing to go to a community college first? Mr. Moretz worried that the plan could drive some students to private colleges or for-profit colleges, or outside of North Carolina. Students who were offered deferred admission to Chapel Hill might consider the University of Virginia instead, he said; students deferred from North Carolina State University might opt for the Georgia Institute of Technology or Virginia Tech.

“The mere nature of applying to UNC institutions indicates an intent on attending a four-year institution,” Mr. Moretz said. “What we’re going to be tasked with saying is, You’re admitted, but you can’t enroll.”

Then there’s the dispute over whether community-college graduates are as prepared for rigorous academic work as are students who spend their first two years at a four-year university. In North Carolina, Senator Curtis said, 74 percent of community-college transfers go on to earn a bachelor’s degree, while six of the university system’s campuses have six-year graduation rates below 50 percent.

But, Representative Horn said, “we need to up the game at our community colleges,” which he described as under-resourced and too focused on vocational education.

Mr. Curtis said one way to design a deferred-admission program would involve raising the UNC system’s admission standards, which currently require a high-school grade-point average of 2.5 or greater. Officials could increase the minimum, he said, and route students between 2.5 and the new baseline to community colleges.

‘Just Getting Started’

The universities have already bolstered their relationship with community colleges over the past five years, Mr. Moretz said, pointing to an articulation agreement that the two systems signed in 2014 to ease the transfer process.

That same year, Mr. Moretz and several officials of the university and community-college systems gave a presentation to the legislature’s joint education-oversight committee about the deferred-admission plan. Mr. Moretz said he told lawmakers, “We’re just getting started. Let’s don’t layer something else on top.”

The community-college system generally supports the program, though, Mr. Moretz said. Scott Ralls, who led the community-college system for seven years before stepping down as president last year, said in 2013 that “the clearer those pathways, the better it is, the better that will be for our long-term work force in North Carolina.” A spokeswoman for the community colleges said officials are still weighing the pros and cons.

But university faculty members are skeptical of the program’s ability to increase access and graduation rates for students from less-privileged backgrounds. If deferrals were determined primarily by high-school grades, the proposal could shut more of those students out, said Stephen T. Leonard, a professor of political science at Chapel Hill and president of the system’s Faculty Assembly.

“We’re trying to be smarter about the admissions standards we use so that we can identify potentially talented students who may not qualify under a less-flexible kind of traditional admission standard,” he said. “This would make that effort a lot more difficult.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

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