North Carolina Is a Model for Higher-Education Reform

In the realm of state higher-education reform, Texas and Florida are often in the spotlight. But North Carolina’s slow, thoughtful reforms have led to important and lasting changes for Tar Heel students and citizens.

Reform across four key areas began more than a decade ago. It continues as North Carolina’s legislature, universities, and community colleges make incremental but essential changes. Most of the reforms haven’t been headline-grabbing, but they’ve been worth doing nonetheless.

North Carolina leads the country in campus free-speech protections, with 15 public universities earning a “green light” from FIRE. Protections for Free Speech

North Carolina leads the country in campus free-speech protections, with 15 public universities earning a “green light” from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. UNC-Chapel Hill led the way in 2015 when it rewrote its campus speech policies to comply with the First Amendment. The North Carolina General Assembly followed in 2017 by passing the Campus Free Speech Act, which required institutions to protect expressive activity. The UNC System responded by adopting the Chicago Principles for Free Expression. (Most individual boards of trustees also adopted their own free-speech principles.)

In 2022, UNC-Chapel Hill became the first public institution to commit to institutional neutrality. In 2022, UNC-Chapel Hill became the first public institution to commit to institutional neutrality, formally adopting the Kalven Report. Its actions were followed by the UNC System in 2024. The System also prohibited compelled speech, not just focusing on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements but broadening the prohibition to include all kinds of political litmus tests.

Fiscally Prudent Funding Reforms

North Carolina has already made some extremely important and fiscally responsible changes to its university funding model over the past 15 years. Historically, UNC System institutions were funded entirely based on enrollment projections. This formula incentivized institutions to enroll students regardless of their preparation and to over-project attendance (because institutions faced minimal consequences for errors).

In 2011, the General Assembly directed the UNC System to rethink its legislative funding requests. Today, the enrollment-funding formula is based on actual completed student credit hours. This change ensures that taxpayers don’t overpay for enrollment that never materialized and also incentivizes universities to focus on actual students instead of mere access and enrollment.

Smart Centralization

Consolidated in 1971, the UNC System comprises 16 universities. For many years, each university maintained its own administrative units, with the System functioning only as an oversight organization. More recently, the System has begun to centralize non-academic functions, creating significant savings for students and citizens of North Carolina.

In 2016, the General Administration Organizational Assessment laid out an ambitious centralization agenda. It identified a series of functions as appropriate for shared service or system-level execution, including IT hosting, legal affairs, payroll, procurement, university-advancement support, enrollment drives, financial-aid verification, and residency verification.

Residency verification provides an excellent example of how such services benefit students. Prior to the centralization of this service, North Carolina students who applied to more than one UNC System institution had to submit paperwork proving North Carolina residency to each university separately. Today, students submit this information just once, saving considerable time and hassle.

Academic Quality Improvements

The UNC System has also made significant strides towards higher academic quality in the past few years.

In 2024, the UNC System adopted a requirement that all students learn about the “Foundations of American Democracy,” which Martin Center contributor Michael C. Behrent wrote about here. With this requirement’s implementation, students will read essential primary documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, several of the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” North Carolina is now one of only 14 states that require all undergraduate university students to study civics in order to graduate.

The UNC System has made significant strides towards higher academic quality in the past few years. Also in 2024, the UNC System reinstated its standardized-testing requirement, at least for some students. Like many universities, it had suspended all standardized testing to accommodate students during Covid lockdowns. In 2024, it revived the requirement for applicants with a GPA of less than 2.8. While this requirement won’t meaningfully affect the state’s most competitive institutions, it will prevent regional schools from admitting students who are overwhelmingly likely to fail. (More recently, the System instructed constituent institutions to accept the Classic Learning Test, a meaningful alternative to the SAT and ACT.)

North Carolina’s track record of slow, thoughtful reform has been moving in the right direction. Early in 2025, the UNC System ended DEI in general-education courses. In a memo to all UNC constituent institutions, UNC System senior vice president for legal affairs & general counsel Andrew Tripp wrote, “All general education requirements and major-specific requirements mandating completion of course credits related to diversity, equity, and inclusion … are suspended.” This change significantly improved general-education curricula across all 16 UNC universities by removing ideology from coursework.

Also last year, the UNC System directed all universities to make syllabi available to the public. In December, the UNC System adopted a formal regulation requiring the publication of syllabi and defining them as institutional documents.

A Pattern of Reform

None of this is to say that North Carolina is perfect. In some of the cases mentioned above, there is still work to be done. In particular, I would like to see improvements to the standardized testing and syllabus policies.

But the beauty of North Carolina’s reform efforts is that they have been incremental and often self-correcting. North Carolina’s higher-education system isn’t perfect. But administrators, trustees, and faculty across the North Carolina higher-education landscape actively look for ways to improve. North Carolina’s track record of slow, thoughtful reform has been moving in the right direction. And that’s well worth emulating.

Jenna A. Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.