Federal ‘Disruption’ Aside, NC Leaders Are Bullish on Higher Ed

At the first event in The Assembly’s Newsmakers Series, three state leaders in higher education and research emphasized their optimism about the future, despite the bad news dominating headlines.

“I don’t believe the national narrative about higher education is the North Carolina narrative about higher education,” UNC System President Peter Hans told the sold-out, 125-person crowd at Raleigh’s Jiddi Courtyard on Wednesday. “When I visit with colleagues from other states and we compare notes, I’m able to tell them enrollment is up, retention is up, graduation is up, public funding is up, private funding is up.”

Hans boasted that the UNC System hasn’t raised in-state tuition in almost a decade—“No other state in the country can make that claim”—and noted that fewer than half of its graduates take on student debt.

“That’s a remarkable success story,” he said.

Hans and the event’s two other guests, North Carolina Central University Chancellor Karrie Dixon and RTI International CEO Tim Gabel, were separately interviewed on stage.

All three were bullish, even as they acknowledged the difficulty of navigating federal cuts to key areas like research and Medicaid funding. Both Hans and Gabel called threats to federal support a “disruption.”

Gabel compared today’s climate to when he joined RTI during the Ronald Reagan administration, saying there were “lots of executive orders, lots of changes to research funding, lots of layoffs at RTI” then, too. Trump administration policies have led RTI to reduce more than a third of its workforce since January.

“The word ‘unprecedented’ has been used, but in fact it’s sort of a typical business cycle,” Gabel said.

The changes are significant, however. Since the Trump administration began canceling projects—including vaccine grants and grants that focus on issues such as gender or racial identity—North Carolina has lost more than $467 million in National Institutes of Health funding alone, according to Grant Watch. Program cancellations at other agencies, reductions in the facilities and administrative costs that can be included in federal research grants, major changes to financial aid programs, and significant cuts to Medicaid have added millions more to the potential losses colleges and universities face.

Hans said he views the current political environment as a “populist backlash” to higher education, after a period in which he said political leaders often treated those who did not earn four-year degrees as failures and tuition costs increasingly made college seem like a “luxury good” in much of the country. But he also said North Carolina bucks the trend.

“People are often surprised to hear that this very conservative legislature that we have has boosted state recurring appropriations for the university system by 32 percent in the last five years alone,” he said. He also pointed to the General Assembly approving billions in non-recurring capital projects, especially for what he called the “boring” but essential work of renovations and repair to the system’s substantial stock of buildings.

“The political parties may message their feelings and opinions about higher education in very different ways—they certainly do at the national level—but in North Carolina, we have been the beneficiary of a bipartisan consensus,” Hans added.

Dixon pointed to $300 million in investments that she said Elizabeth City State University received during her tenure as chancellor there from 2018 until last year, when she moved to NCCU.

When legislators came to ECSU, she said, “they realized why those resources were in such great need. That’s how we were able to get those investments, and it really made the difference for the campus.”

The Bots

Gabel said that funding cuts have accelerated RTI’s move toward new markets, including agricultural technology, energy, and especially the defense sector. But the biggest growth area, all three panelists agreed, is artificial intelligence.

“That’s going to cut across all areas of research,” Gabel said.

Dixon touted NCCU’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research.

“We have to embrace AI because AI is here to stay. There’s no way we’re going to get around it,” she said, adding that students are coming to NCCU because of those research opportunities and because the school is embedding AI into its curriculum.

Hans joked that the impact of both AI and the future of higher ed more broadly would fall “somewhere between utopia and annihilation.” He said it would be particularly disruptive to less-selective schools.

“I hear anecdotes about students that are completing assignments that are AI-generated,” he said. “And faculty are using the tool more often as well. It’s one bot talking to another bot, and I don’t know that we’re going to be able to charge a lot of money for that.”

To protect higher education, Hans argued institutions must make the case for something that is very much not cutting edge: the liberal arts.

“We’ve got to expose our students to artificial intelligence, but we’ve got to pair it with emotional intelligence, making sense of this information. How do you do research? How do you develop your skills?” he said. “Because if deep learning is sacrificed, that would be a huge loss to all of us, and higher education has to figure out how to get ahead of that curve in order to provide value to our students, and frankly, to continue to survive.”

Gabel adopted a similar stance even while advocating for increased research into AI. Though he said AI and quantum physics are good majors for college students today, he said the liberal arts would be a better focus for younger students.

“The role of engineers is going to be there, and we need that,” he said. “But I really think the human element might become the differentiator” over the next few decades.

In trying to navigate that minefield of rapid change, all three leaders stressed the value of connections and partnerships available in North Carolina, from N.C. Central working with other universities as it attempts to expand its campus to meet student demand, to RTI regularly hiring graduates of N.C. State University’s Institute for Advanced Analytics.

“There’s not a region in this country that I’d rather be in than ours,” Gabel said. “I think we’re well-positioned to tackle what’s in front of us.”