Transfer students make our universities better, bringing a wealth of talent and life experience that sharpens classroom discussion and makes campus life richer for everyone.
The fact that North Carolina’s public universities welcomed a record number of transfer students this year — more than 18,000 across the UNC System, including nearly 11,000 drawn from the state’s community colleges — is good for our colleges, good for those students, and great for North Carolina.
We need to be a state where talented students can get their start anywhere and follow their aspirations wherever they lead.
— President Peter Hans
I’m a transfer myself, having proudly served as president of the North Carolina Community College System before leading the UNC System, so I know firsthand the breadth of motivation and talent that resides across our Great 58 community colleges. Those institutions do a fantastic job of welcoming students at every stage of life and offering them the chance to earn credentials and credits in everything from aerospace manufacturing to viticulture science.
It should be easy to take those credits to a four-year university. Students shouldn’t have to piece together a bureaucratic puzzle in order to move their education from one public institution to another. For years, messy and uneven transfer policies cost students time and money, and effectively discouraged many promising community college students from continuing on to a four-year degree.
North Carolina simply can’t afford to waste that kind of talent.
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Like universities across the nation, North Carolina’s colleges are facing a decline in traditional-age students, the result of a long-running decline in birthrates. If we’re going to keep up the pipeline of talent that North Carolina’s dynamic economy demands, we need to get far better at welcoming and supporting students in different phases of life and from backgrounds that we haven’t always reached effectively, including more low-income students, rural students, and working adults ready to make a career change.
Community colleges are crucial to that effort. Since coming to the UNC System more than five years ago, I have been stubbornly insistent on making transfer easier and more inviting. In partnership with the community colleges, we’ve made transfer agreements much more comprehensive, cutting down on the maddening problem of lost credits. We’ve published hundreds of program guides to show students exactly how different community college pathways can lead into a university degree. We’ve sped up transcript review so students aren’t left waiting to see how their credits will apply. And we created a common course catalog so that core classes across the UNC System share the same numbering and designation, making it much easier for transfer students to clearly see how their coursework can count toward a four-year degree.
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve worked with our lawmakers to simplify state financial aid into a single, easy-to-understand NextNC Scholarship that covers community college tuition for most middle-class North Carolinians and covers university tuition across much of the UNC System, providing steady support to students even as they move between systems. Thanks to efforts like that, student debt is on the decline in North Carolina, with more than half of UNC System students graduating debt free.
The goal of all of these changes is to make North Carolina the best state in the country to pursue higher education, no matter where you start and no matter where you want to end up.
Thanks to generations of bipartisan investment, we have one of the strongest public university systems in the country and one of the most comprehensive community college systems, putting a quality education within close reach of every North Carolinian.
There is enormous ground to be gained when those two systems work well together.
The growth in transfer students is a welcome sign that the weedy work of improving credit policies and degree alignment is starting to pay off, both for our students and our state.
Editor’s note: This fall, the UNC System’s 16 universities welcomed 18,719 transfer students, an 8.2% increase since fall 2024, and the highest number on record. Of those, 10,840 students transferred from community colleges to UNC System institutions. Read more on the UNC System’s website.
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