WINSTON-SALEM (October 29, 2025) – Forsyth Tech President Dr. Janet Spriggs eases into it.
She first thanks the NC General Assembly in the accompanying video for providing enrollment growth funds for community colleges – Forsyth Tech’s enrollment was up 13% this fall alone.
Yet North Carolina is a state that loves its community colleges – except at budget time.
Spriggs gently points out that the legislature – which went home yet again this month without adopting a budget for 2025-271 – did not fund Propel NC, a plan that would have helped colleges target their offerings in high-value careers.2
NOR DID THE LEGISLATURE fund raises for community-college faculty, who are among the lowest-paid in both the South and the nation.
“We are still very much below the nation in community-college average faculty salaries – I think we are 40th out of 50 states,” she says. “And if we look at the South, we are near the bottom (in) the South. I think there’s only one or two states that pay their faculty at community colleges lower than we do.
“So that’s a big problem, Spriggs says.
“We have to be able to have highly credentialed, highly educated, well-rounded and ready faculty to teach the students to be able to move into the careers.
“It’s a workforce-development issue, it’s a social mobility issue for us not to be able to afford the faculty that will teach the students and then the graduates that are gonna become the graduates for these jobs that we have shortages in right now, and the places where we know we’re going to have shortages in the future.
“So I really do hope that the General Assembly will address salaries,” Spriggs says, noting that inflation and prices for household goods remain high.
“I think inflation is real. We all feel it. Our health-insurance premiums are going up this (budget) year… all those things are going up, but no one is getting the increases in their income to match those increases in expenses.…
“But what we really need is to be able to pay them what they need to be paid in order to make the commitment to come and be the faculty we need them to be, so that our state can stay the number-one state in business,” Spriggs says.
1https://www.nccommunitycolleges.edu/college-faculty-staff/academics/propel-nc-a-workforce-driven-business-model-for-north-carolinas-future/; https://www.ednc.org/6-4-2025-what-is-the-status-of-propel-nc-the-n-c-community-college-systems-new-funding-model/.
2 https://www.wunc.org/term/news/2025-10-22/nc-legislature-likely-done-2025; https://www.wral.com/story/no-new-nc-budget-likely-until-at-least-2026-as-gop-leaders-adjourn-with-no-deal/22210148/; https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article312603311.html.
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