(Op-Ed) A Misguided Vision: Why Expanding UNC-Chapel Hill Isn’t the Answer

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts has suggested adding 5,000 new undergraduates to the student body at our state’s flagship university. He argues for this reform by drawing a simple contrast between North Carolina’s robust growth and the stagnant undergraduate population at the university he leads. 

This analogy is plausible, but more careful scrutiny reveals that Roberts’s intention to grow the Chapel Hill campus would harm both UNC itself and the broader University of North Carolina system. Moving forward with his plan would be a damaging mistake.

UNC is already a very large public university. The University’s closest peer institution, the University of Virginia, has roughly half the enrollment of Chapel Hill, and Duke University only enrolls one-quarter of UNC’s undergraduate population. 

This is significant because the size of a student body correlates directly with the selectivity of the university’s undergraduate admissions. And the experience of another comparable public institution indicates that loosening up a college’s admissions policies threatens to dilute the quality of the students accepted to the University.

In the early 2000s, the University of Texas dramatically changed its affirmative action policies. Race-conscious admissions were now verboten, so UT established the principle that any Texas high school student graduating in the top 10% of their class would receive a guaranteed spot in Austin. 

Texas had now committed to accepting a vastly broader array of students to its undergraduate program. While the policy was egalitarian and helped to blunt the impact of ending racial affirmative action, it dramatically reduced standards at the University of Texas. Years later, while UT-Austin remains an esteemed institution, it is not ranked in the “elite” tier of the top 30 national universities.

Adding 5,000 undergraduates to UNC would likely have a similar effect. In fact, this is a mathematical certainty. If a similar number of applicants compete for a larger number of spots, the university’s admissions rate will go up—and its academic standards will go down. A great university should strive to uphold the highest standards possible. Currently, UNC has an admissions rate comparable to UVA and the University of Michigan. Accepting a larger number of less-qualified students would erode Chapel Hill’s competitive position.

At the same time, expanding UNC would harm the regional campuses that are the workhorses of public higher education in North Carolina. Excellent schools like UNC-Greensboro are suffering from declining enrollment, necessitating cuts in valuable programs on these campuses. 

With 2,500 more in-state students allowed to attend Chapel Hill, the other UNC campuses would almost certainly suffer further reductions in student enrollment. Thus, expanding UNC would damage the standards of the flagship campus itself and place struggling regional schools at a further disadvantage at a time of falling college attendance.

Expanding UNC’s student body to match North Carolina’s population growth may seem intuitive, even commonsensical. But the reality is that such a reform would somehow manage to be both anti-meritocratic and inegalitarian. The flagship campus would experience a decline in standards, and smaller, less-advantaged institutions would be plunged further into hardship. 

We should seek to shore up the schools that enroll the bulk of North Carolina college students, not water down the standards of UNC-Chapel Hill in the name of mathematical symmetry.

By Alexander H. Jones

Alexander H. Jones is a Policy Analyst for Carolina Forward, who lives in Carrboro. This column was originally published on NC Newsline,