UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts (Photo: UNC-CH video feed)
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 facially 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…