Fayetteville State University seeing record enrollment, retention

Fayetteville State University may be among the smaller public institutions in North Carolina, but it’s punching above its weight.

With the onset of the academic year, the university is celebrating historic benchmarks like 80.7% student retention and the enrollment of more than 7,700 students. Both are all-time records for the school, which bounced back from a retention rate of 63% and has grown by more than 1,000 students since 2021. Last year’s graduating class was its largest ever.

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Success Tavoria Freeman, who has worked at Fayetteville State since 2006, told Carolina Public Press that, while there has been steady growth over time as the university aimed for new heights, it’s seemed to have soared in recent years.

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“I’ve been here a long time, and these last five years, it feels like we’ve just pushed ahead really, really fast,” she said. “I can of course see how we have slowly grown over the years, but I feel like we’ve had a lot of accelerated growth in the last five years. It’s really exciting.”

But none of these achievements come by surprise, and they certainly didn’t happen overnight, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management Cierra Griffin said. The growth has been a result of strategic and intentional partnerships and marketing efforts, including a heightened focus on transfer and military student populations.

Griffin also credits the leadership of Pam Baldwin, the university’s inaugural vice chancellor for strategic enrollment and student success, who was appointed to the position in 2024 after serving as the associate dean of academic partnerships. Baldwin often tells fellow administrators to look at the data, consider what story it tells and what the strategy should be.

The university’s partnership with a number of North Carolina community colleges, Bronco Benefit, was born out of Baldwin’s assessment that there needed to be a better strategy for attracting transfer students, for example. The university also uses the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association to its benefit, the athletic association Fayetteville State is a part of, which is made up entirely of historically Black colleges and universities. 

Fayetteville State recently became a Common Application partner, a standardized college application platform used by more than 1,000 universities. It’s also the university’s third cycle in the NC College Connect program, which offers direct admission to North Carolina high school students that meet admissions requirements. Executive Director of Admissions LaToya Floyd said they’ve also employed a digital marketing campaign, and frequently host virtual events for those who they can’t connect with in person. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a billboard.

“We’re starting to tell our story,” Baldwin said. 

“All of those things together create an opportunity for us to meet our goals, whether that’s enrollment or retention, telling those stories and allowing this team to do the great work when they understand clearly what the mission is. 

“I don’t believe anything is a surprise or happens by accident. I think you put a plan in place. You work with your partners. You talk with strategic comms about how you want to push harder through the military space, or you want to work differently with the community colleges, and then those things happen, and then of course, the results come.”

While recruiting, the university leads with the benefits of being an NC Promise institution. Through a partnership with the state, Fayetteville State and three other universities are able to offer in-state tuition for just $500 per semester. Affordability and access are at the forefront of the university’s mission, as it is for the NC Promise program as a whole, Floyd said.

“We want to make sure that students who come here understand that the plan is to ensure they complete the degree that they began with as little debt as possible,” Floyd said.

Not only is the university attracting more applicants — those applicants are more high-achieving than ever. The average GPA of this year’s freshman class is a 3.45 on the 4.0 scale, another historic high for the university. It’s through the efforts to increase the visibility of the university that they’ve been able to attract scholars with even bigger and better achievements, Floyd said.

For keeping those high achievers on an upward trajectory, culture and climate matter, Baldwin said. Winners like to be around other winners, so when a standard is set, especially in a close-knit environment like Fayetteville State — which students and faculty have affectionately dubbed “Family State University” — people usually want to strive to meet it, she said.

As for keeping those students coming back and achieving this year’s momentous retention rate, Griffin said it starts at the leadership level. When everyone agrees on the mission, supporting the student population from the top down gets a lot easier.

“We don’t do any magic tricks — we do what makes sense,” Griffin said.

“It’s the little things, low-hanging fruit that keep our students coming back. Putting advisors as instructors for the freshman seminar classes, collaborating with our campus partners like financial aid to address issues such as balances. Sometimes it’s just a matter of money. Little things like that and meeting our students where they are. One thing that I know truly works with our students is we understand that life happens.”

The culture of support at Fayetteville State has transformed over the last 10 years from reactive to proactive, Freeman said. Utilizing data has helped the university understand how it can support students in the present moment, rather than after they’ve fallen behind. 

The student success team analyzes quantitative data on students’ grades, percentage of students who receive a D, F or withdraw from a course, who has yet to declare a major and percentage of completion toward a degree, as well as surveys that provide qualitative information. 

“We’re looking at this data every day, and we’re trying to see, ‘What students do we need to support today? Who do we need to connect with today,’” Freeman said.

“Especially as it relates to things that might hinder them from persisting in the future. We can see what’s going on with their account profile, whether that be the grades, the early alerts, the balances, and we can start that outreach early so that we can prevent them from having those holes or having other barriers that come up that’ll stop them from getting to that graduation point in four years or less.”

This summer, an anonymous trust gifted the university $6.5 million, the largest private contribution in Fayetteville State history. It’s from the same trust that donated $5.8 million in 2022. And with the passage of the North Carolina budget bill, the university will receive an annually recurring $2 million from the state. 

Rather than using the funds for new programs, it’ll be allocated toward the university’s free summer school program — an initiative that has already produced positive results.

“We have been really fortunate, in not only our private donations, but also the work that we’re doing in partnership with the state to ensure that all of our funding is supporting our initiatives that are already in place that are very strategic,” Baldwin said.

“Our 30-60-90 free summer school, for example, is one of our strategies, and so we’re not trying to create new stuff with new money. … Of course, there will be tweaks along the way. We’re increasing our nursing opportunities, as an example. We want to make sure that we utilize funding to take care of the initiatives that our data says is either working or we need to do to continue the progress.”

Enrollment at HBCUs like Fayetteville State has been up around the country, a stark contrast to the trends across higher education overall, which some have gone as far to call an “enrollment crisis.” The times are undoubtedly changing, and it’s important for higher education leaders to pay attention, Baldwin said.

“If we’re going to stand still and let the grass grow around us, we’re going to be in trouble,” she said.

“Paying attention to what’s happening — that return on investment is important, that students want to graduate not only with a piece of paper but a job, and that includes internships and experiences while they’re here at Fayetteville State University — and knowing we are responsible for providing those opportunities. … 

“It’s extremely important that we are not just having students walk across a stage, but they are walking across a stage into life, and they are going to be successful because of their experiences at Fayetteville State University.”

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