ADMISSIONS: SHOOTING FOR STARS
but the others crave some acknowledgement that the University knows they are
stars. And, until recently, “modest” had
been a charitable description of UNC’s
attention to merit aid.
It got a jump start with $12 million
dedicated to merit from a $28 million
private bequest in 2000 — since that year,
the University has handed out almost $29
million, mostly in
fairly small amounts.
Shirley Ort,
director of scholarships and student
aid, said UNC has “a
big platform” for
need-based aid, but
“we need both
access and excellence, and they’re
not mutually exclusive. We may not
have had as much
air time with the
excellence.”
Ort said it is
harder to raise merit
money than need
money at Carolina
— it’s the other way
around at most
schools. She thinks
it’s part of the University’s culture, the
ethos of access for
everybody.
Ravenscraft said
the business school
got 15 good students from the pre-admis-sions-guarantee last year — but the school
made 50 to 60 offers.
“That’s not the yield we’re looking
for,” he said, and one reason was an
absence of scholarships. “The goal is to be
able to offer some. I think it will make a
huge difference.”
Said Thorp, “I think the Art and Science Group was on target” on the need
for more merit awards. “That’s what I’m
hearing from a lot of students. We have to
do it.”
Putting More Muscle Into Recruiting
IWashington, D.C., offered and with a friend set to go there. Carolina, more affordable and where her parents had gone to school.
J.J. Raynor says she was a shy high school student at Myers Park in Charlotte
t came down to UNC and Georgetown. Georgetown with all the opportunities
when she was invited to briefly sample student life on the Hill, to spend the night in a
dorm. She didn’t know that not every accepted applicant got this invitation.
Georgetown had sent her a Christmas card and had called on the phone. Carolina
had not. But on that visit, on
that evening in Teague, she said
she saw the “real” Carolina, and
she made her move. Later, she
came to realize that she might
not have been able to study
abroad twice in Southeast Asia
— she probably would have
had to work to help pay for
school. A policy internship
attracted her to Georgetown; at
UNC she started a student policy think tank and worked with
it on the national level.
“When I was a senior in
high school, I had no idea what
would become the important
attributes of being here,”
Raynor said.
As hard as all the best
schools try to out-point each other for the best students, Raynor believes Carolina really
does have some superlatives. Over her four years that are coming to a close, as is her
term as student body president, she’s seen improvement in the way the University sells
itself. She thinks there’s room for more, and she got the chance to explore that hunch
when she and trustee John Ellison ’ 69 were asked to direct a yearlong study of how the
University can preserve its quality in the face of more enrollment growth.
At one of the first meetings, Undergraduate Admissions Director Steve Farmer said,
“We haven’t put our muscle into this like we could.”
When Raynor came back to Teague dorm for real, she was surprised to find herself
quickly pulled into all sorts of extracurricular and social activities. Admissions didn’t
talk about all those opportunities. Now, she says, they do.
When she and Ellison report back to the trustees this spring, they’ll be talking about
some big ideas they’ve gathered from talking to some 1,500 people.
What, for instance, if UNC could form academic pods around big issues such as disease,
hunger, climate change and alternative energy? What if you could sell recruits by telling
them that they would do work designed around these issues in a fairly small group with a
couple of faculty members in the fall, then pursue it in independent study in the spring?
Raynor refers to this as “minoring in solving the world’s problems.”
“I think it’ll be very attractive to our generation of students.” And, she said, it’s a natural niche for a school that emphasizes service and social justice. “The great part for
Carolina is this is our competitive advantage.”
Raynor has helped persuade students admitted not just to Carolina but to its honors
program that Chapel Hill is where they need to be (she allowed as how she posted a
100 percent personal “yield”). Now she’s been asked to go to her hometown and meet
one-on-one with more of UNC’s targets for next year.
She’s convinced that one thing they want is classmates who are as good or better
than they are. “They want to know they’re going to be making a step up.”
— David E. Brown ’ 75
DAN SEARS ’ 74
Student body
President J.J. Raynor
talks with students
who serve as admissions ambassadors
and as members of
an enrollment excellence task force.
What makes you so special
“So imagine that a student could come to
Chapel Hill to major in Mandarin and
international studies while addressing global
health. Or major in chemistry while address-
