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Lower Tuition Leads To Higher Enrollment At 3 NC Universities

Celebrating the Class of 2020 at Western Carolina University. Photo courtesy of Ashley Evans, WCU.

Three North Carolina universities that drastically dropped tuition are seeing record undergraduate enrollment.

Elizabeth City State University, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Western Carolina University were benefactors of the NC Promise program, which is funded by the state legislature. The program allowed the schools to lower their tuition to $1,000 a year for in-state undergraduates and $5,000 a year for out-of-state students.

The News and Observer reports undergraduate enrollment is up 19 percent at Elizabeth City State, 14 percent at UNC Pembroke and over 6 percent at WCU.

The schools have seen particularly high increases in students transferring from other schools, with many coming in from community colleges.

One enrollment official at WCU said the reduced tuition program has acted “like a booster rocket” for admissions and has exceeded all expectations.

Neal Charnoff joined 88.5 WFDD as Morning Edition host in 2014. Raised in the Catskill region of upstate New York, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1983. Armed with a liberal arts degree, Neal was fully equipped to be a waiter. So he prolonged his arrested development bouncing around New York and L.A. until discovering that people enjoyed listening to his voice on the radio. After a few years doing overnight shifts at a local rock station, Neal spent most of his career at Vermont Public Radio. He began as host of a nightly jazz program, where he was proud to interview many of his idols, including Dave Brubeck and Sonny Rollins. Neal graduated to the news department, where he was the local host for NPR's All Things Considered for 14 years. In addition to news interviews and features, he originated and produced the Weekly Conversation On The Arts, as well as VPR Backstage, which profiled theater productions around the state. He contributed several stories to NPR, including coverage of a devastating ice storm. Neal now sees the value of that liberal arts degree, and approaches life with the knowledge that all subjects and all art forms are connected to each other. Neal and his wife Judy are enjoying exploring North Carolina and points south. They would both be happy to never experience a Vermont winter again.

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