By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — The UNC system wants enrollment at its campuses to grow, but it also wants the schools to increase their graduation and retention rates — and wants to tie financial support to those rates.

N.C. Central University leaders want the UNC system to understand that NCCU has a unique mission and shouldn’t necessarily be judged by the standards of other campuses.

“If General Administration and the Board of Governors say we’re going to have the same expectations for all institutions, that would be a problem,” NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms told a meeting of the school’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday. “I don’t have any problem with the greater levels of accountability. But I can’t support a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Schools like UNC Chapel Hill, N.C. State University and UNC Wilmington have a different mission and focus on a different profile of students, NCCU leaders said as they engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of managing enrollment at the campus.

N.C. Central is a “low-wealth school,” where 95 percent of the students receive some kind of financial aid, Nelms said, and “we want to make sure the goals for North Carolina Central are appropriate to this institution’s mission and focus.”

Glenn Adams, chairman of the NCCU trustees, recently wrote to Hannah Gage, who heads the system’s Board of Governors, to make that point.

“We know the culture of our students,” Adams said. “That’s why we want to suggest what the change [in enrollment policy] is going to be.”

The system policy, proposed earlier this fall by UNC President Erskine Bowles, would reward campus performance, rather than just growth.

But “low-wealth schools by definition have fewer college-ready students,” Nelms said. “That’s what we’ve tried to look at with General Administration. We’ve told them, let’s look at college-ready students. That’s should be the approach.”

Adams said he had already spoken with a couple of members of the Board of Governors and they have been receptive to the university’s position. “We want them to understand that you have to look at the unique population of each school, and I think they do understand that,” he said.

System projections call for NCCU — where total enrollment has grown by more than 50 percent over the past decade — to have more than 13,000 students by fall 2017. That would be another increase of around 50 percent.

But while the university is enrolling more students, as it has been directed by the UNC system, it also has been struggling with having them successfully complete their education.

Since 2004, only 18 percent of NCCU students have graduated within four years; just more than a third did it in five years and only around half managed to graduate within six years.

Retention rates — the percentage of students who return each year — also have been low. “We’ve had some ups and downs, but the rate pretty much has stayed flat,” said Assistant Vice Chancellor for Institutional Research Shawn Stewart. Around a quarter of each freshman class does not return for a second year of college.

Many students, officials said, simply have not been not college-ready.

“A lot of it has to do with preparation for African-American students,” said Kevin Rome, NCCU’s vice chancellor for student affairs. “There’s a difference in their level of preparation when they come here. A lot of our students may not be as prepared for college as they should be, or as students are at other institutions.

“We have to look at the characteristics of students coming in,” Rome added. “It’s not just what the institution is doing or not doing. It’s an issue that exists throughout the country.”

Nelms pointed out that the situation — low-wealth students not fully college-ready — is not unique to HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities.

“We are not the only institutions with this kind of profile,” he said. “But because we have this kind of profile, we do have a different mission. That is why we’ve made some adjustments to the enrollment projections [made by the UNC system].”

The NCCU adjustments project around 550 students less in 2017 than what the UNC system originally had called for.