NC’s Direct Admissions Program Must Proceed With Caution

Last year, the UNC System rolled out NC College Connect, a direct college admissions program for North Carolinian public high school students. While the program clearly streamlines admissions by mailing acceptance letters directly to students, it is less clear whether it will help them earn a valuable college diploma.

The program, which launched with 62,000 students last fall, extends admission offers to select NC colleges and universities to students who complete their junior year, maintain a weighted GPA of 2.8 or higher, and meet institution-specific criteria—such as taking a certain number of language and math courses in high school. The ostensible goal of NC College Connect is to make it “easier than ever” for students to get a college education. 

The NC College Connect program will undoubtedly meet its stated goal of expanding access to the college classroom for certain North Carolinian high schoolers. How could it not? The initiative does away with the whole application part of the application process, only requiring students to “claim their spot” on an online portal—no essays, recommendation letters, or transcripts needed. 

This policy could be particularly impactful for some students. The college application process remains a significant barrier to higher education. Even in the age of Common App and ChatGPT’d personal statements, many students struggle to complete applications despite applying to more schools than past generations. One paper out of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute highlights this difficulty, concluding that even among high school students who begin their college application on Common App, approximately 24% of them never submit their work. 

In this respect, the state can, and has, made the argument that directly admitting qualified students will increase their likelihood of enrollment in an accredited college or university. Peter Hans, president of the UNC System, made this very claim, in an August 2025 press release, that NC College Connect will remove the  “unnecessary complexity” and “bureaucratic hurdles” associated with the college application process to make it easier than ever for students to attend college in North Carolina. 

But simply getting a student in the door of a university is only part of this program’s goal. Will it help students graduate?

Of the dozens of institutions included in the NC College Connect program, zero fall within the top-140 of national universities. Many colleges included in the program—St. Augustine’s, Shaw, Pfeiffer, etc.—have experienced extensive financial, accreditation, and/or enrollment problems in recent years. And, rather tellingly, the program excludes UNC-Chapel Hill and NCSU, the state’s premier public institutions, from the direct admissions scheme.

For these reasons and more, one must at the very least ask whether this program will really benefit the prospective applicants’ chances of educational success more than the pockets of the middling institutions the program enables them to attend. For that we must turn to the state’s own graduation and enrollment data.

On the whole, the eleven UNC System schools included in the College Connect program boast a six-year graduation rate of 60.3%, about a percentage point below the national average. At these institutions, Pell Grant recipients, a demographic ostensibly targeted by the initiative, have a 53.3% 6-year graduation rate compared to 65.6% of non-recipients. 

By contrast, Pell Grant recipients at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill, the state’s two highest-performing public institutions, graduate at a rate of 83.5% in six years, only 5.4% behind non-Pell Grant recipients and over 30% higher than grant recipients at the eleven included schools.

These data suggest that institutional quality influences student retention. Whether this is because schools like UNC-Chapel Hill excel at supporting their students’ educational journey, introduce students to a more robust social safety net, or simply inflate their grades is besides the point. What matters is that the state’s own data show a substantial gap in student outcomes between participating schools and the state’s flagship universities.

To ensure that this gap does not widen going forward and that the state’s most vulnerable students aren’t sold a false bill of goods, the UNC System would do well to report on first-year grades, retention, and graduation rates for these students compared to everyone else—something which has yet to become industry standard in the direct admissions world. The results would allow administrators and the public to determine whether NC College Connect is a “fundamental shift” for good or ill.

Sherman Criner is a Duke University alumnus interested in public policy, history, and political science. He is an incoming Ph.D. student in history at Stanford University.