integrated than they are right now. That’s
going to be hard, but I think it’s going to
be important. That may be on a regional
kind of basis. You can imagine some institutions that are close together that might be
able to share some academic programs. I use
the example of A&T. Unfortunately,
because of budget cuts, they had to eliminate their French major. I hate for a young
person that goes to A&T and may be
thinking they want to be an engineer but
decides they really want to be a French
major once they get there to not have that
opportunity. So is there a way to build a
joint French major with UNC-Greens-boro? Maybe so. We’ve got some programs
already working across campuses. I think we
can do a lot more of that. And I think that’s
going to be particularly important where
we can work together to produce really
high-quality online offerings that are available to all our students across our system.
If we do that well, we can better utilize
our faculty, we can produce a better product for our students and, more important,
we can not reduce what we offer. Most
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Should [enrollment growth] be spread equally among the campuses?
I don’t think it necessarily needs to be. That’s a discussion we need to have.
people’s reaction to all this budget cutting
is “Well, we’re going to have to cut back,
we’re going to have to eliminate programs
and eliminate courses.” I think using more
online and using more of a system
approach we can actually offer at least as
much if not more.
Review: How do you feel about the 18
percent cap on out-of-state admissions? Is
it time to look at loosening that?
Ross: I’m always open to looking at
everything. The underlying principle
behind it is to be sure that we maintain
accessibility for North Carolinians. After all,
about a third of our budget comes from the
state, from the taxpayers. So in my opinion
they have the first call on this, you know?
That’s not to say that a healthy out-of-state
population is not valuable to an institution
— I think it is, and not just for financial
reasons. I think the geographic diversity, the
diversity of thought and background that
people bring is important to an institution.
It’s a balance. [If we were to change the
cap,] I hope we’d do it thoughtfully and not
just for financial reasons.
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