The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s trustees want the university to grow.

By a lot.

On Thursday, the board passed a resolution to recommend UNC enroll 5% of North Carolina’s high school seniors by 2030.

That would increase the number of students from North Carolina enrolling at UNC by up to 46%.

The university already had a goal to add 5,000 students within the decade. This year, for example, the school welcomed its largest incoming class in history. But for the school’s trustees, that existing goal isn’t enough.

“We are in danger of becoming an elitist university instead of an elite university,” said trustee and conservative power broker Jim Blaine, who presented the resolution to the board. “... We just have not kept pace with the state’s growth.”

In the 1990s, UNC-Chapel Hill enrolled approximately 5% of the state’s high school seniors. Now, it’s more like 3%.

The resolution recommends an “aggressive” effort to get back to that 5% figure — an effort that Blaine argued “will give us something to sell to people.”

How many new students?

This year, UNC enrolled 4,294 first-year students from North Carolina.

By 2030, the goal is to increase that number to 6,250.

And after 2030, the resolution recommends developing a plan to continue to enroll 5% of North Carolina’s high school graduates each year.

Blaine argued that enrolling more North Carolinians is UNC’s constitutional duty. He also lamented the 2,000 in-state students who get waitlisted every year. Hardly anything distinguishes them from the in-state students who made the cut, he said.

“These are kids that want to come here, and undoubtedly would be successful here, that we are turning away,” Blaine said. “Every time we turn one of them away, there’s a parent or grandparent that has invested a lifetime worth of tax dollars into supporting us.”

The trustees can’t actually set enrollment levels, as that’s the work of the UNC System. They can, however, make a forceful recommendation.

But can the university — with many of its facilities described as “undersized and outdated” — handle that much growth?

Impact of more students

Housing, dining, campus recreational spaces, parking, study spaces, classrooms, laboratories, office space: All of that would have to be scaled up to meet the moment.

There’s the development of a satellite campus, Carolina North, on the horizon, which answers some of these questions — but not all.

“I think really we’re well positioned to deliver on the 5,000 [goal],” said chief financial officer Nathan Knuffman during his presentation on enrollment growth. But as the trustees work to increase that enrollment goal, “it will just require us to add more capacity quickly, to change the culture and policy on campus more quickly, and really just leverage that state support and be innovative on the financing side. A lot of those things will have to come into shape.”

Student body president Devin Duncan, who has a seat on the Board of Trustees, warned about “moving too ambitiously.” He says dining facilities and the student union already feel as if they’re at capacity, with students “fighting for space.” Duncan wants to ensure that reaching this enrollment goal won’t result in a decreased quality of experience for students.

Trustees said the resolution was edited between Wednesday’s committee meeting and Thursday’s vote to include some language about responsible growth, per Duncan’s concerns.

But Blaine believes that increased enrollment could actually “fix a lot of our facility problems over time” because “growth brings more funding.”

Duncan also brought up the staff members who express that they’re already overworked as the university implements its administrative headcount cap. And Provost Magnus Egerstedt, while supportive of the resolution, brought up the issue of hiring more faculty to teach more students. Graduate students, too, made points about the increased teaching loads they’d likely have to deal with given this growth.

“The math tells us that either we’re going to have bigger classes or we’re going to have more people teaching the students,” Egerstedt said. “... We can’t just turn on a tap and all of a sudden have 50 more really, really sharp research faculty.”

Chancellor Lee Roberts, in his remarks to the board, emphasized that even 10,000 more students wouldn’t take every student off the waitlist or allow UNC to catch up in size to many of its peer institutions.

Roberts acknowledged the need to continue to invest in faculty hiring and in the university’s facilities. He couldn’t give exact numbers on how many faculty would need to be hired to meet increased demand.

“We believe that we not only have the ability to grow,” Roberts said, “but the obligation to grow.”

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