Aidan Van Nynatten

News Writer

The University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) is facing significant budgetary challenges in the 2023-2024 school year, including cuts on departmental spending across the board, according to the post “2023-2024 Budget Reductions and Our Path Forward” on the UNCG website. Academic and administrative divisions are dealing with reductions of 2%-8% from the 2022-23 academic year. Across the university, the total shortfall averages a 4% decrease. The question many are left with is why.

Like other UNC system schools, the UNC Board of Governors determines the university’s budget. In the 2023-2025 report filed after their February 2023 meeting, the board “recommends capping enrollment-based losses over the past two years at no more than 4.5 percent of the current year certified budget. The application of this cap mitigates the funding reductions due to enrollment declines at UNC Asheville and UNC Greensboro.” 

Answering why enrollments have declined is a complex task, especially considering the overall UNC system’s enrollment numbers. The board of governors’ “University of North Carolina FY 2021-2023 Budget Priorities” report states, “Despite the pandemic, the UNC System had the highest student enrollment in the System’s history.” Two years after this report, overall student numbers have swung in the opposite direction, but UNCG, UNCA, and UNC Pembroke were hit harder than other campuses. The 2023 report summarized that for UNC schools collectively in 2022, “resident student credit hours decreased by 2.9 percent,” a figure which the relatively starker declines at Asheville, Greensboro, and Pembroke skewed downward. Therefore, budgetary reprioritizations had to accommodate for these higher-than-average declines. 

The board attributed the decline to “various factors impacting the educational pipeline for undergraduate students: 1) falling birth rates are causing the size of North Carolina’s school-age population to plateau, 2) the proportion of North Carolina high school graduates immediately enrolling in higher education is trending flat to slightly down, 3) the pandemic’s negative impact on community college enrollments has reduced the transfer pipeline to our institutions, and 4) a legislative change to the kindergarten eligibility age in 2009-2010 caused a temporary reduction to the number of students entering public schools that year.”

None of those issues were within the board’s or UNC system’s power to prevent, and some were difficult to predict. According to Centers for Disease Control data on fertility rates by state, the trend of falling birth rates has been apparent since at least 2005. With the state legislation that changed the kindergarten eligibility age passing in 2009, perhaps more preparations in the intervening years would have helped absorb the looming potential college enrollment downturn. 

Other factors also contributed, including incentives and enrollment changes at nearby institutions that drew students who may have traditionally chosen UNCG. A more significant portion of accepted students than in previous years decided not to enroll at any institution. As UNCG professors Mark Elliot and Jeremy Rinker discussed in an opinion article for the Greensboro News & Record last March, they saw the budget shortfall as evidence of the UNC Board of Governors not prioritizing the university’s mission of social mobility. While the entire picture is difficult to clarify, what is clear is that the culmination of many factors led to UNCG’s struggles and slow recovery regarding enrollment and funding. 

The university’s Fall 2023 enrollment numbers published on Sept. 3 offered some optimism, as the overall numbers of first-time college students, transfer students, and readmitted students buoyed UNCG to the “largest first-year class since 2019.” It is too early to know if that trend will continue, but it is a potential sign that enrollment, and thus funding, is on the way to recovery.