RALEIGH (January 30, 2025) – In a state with a severe teacher shortage,1 the NC Teaching Fellows made substantial gains this year, with 107% growth to a total of 575 students who want to become teachers.
“We’re very excited about that. That’s a huge celebration for our program,” Dr. Bennett Jones, Director of the Teaching Fellows program, told a committee of the UNC Board of Governors this week.
“We strive to be a pre-eminent teacher recruitment tool for the state.”
The program offers forgivable loans of as much as $10,000 a year for aspiring teachers at 10 North Carolina colleges. Each year of loans is forgiven for each year a Fellow teaches at a low-performing school, or for each two years teaching at a school that is not low-performing.
The Teaching Fellows program in its original form started in 1987 and spanned all subject matters. By 2013-14, it had produced 4,632 Fellows teaching in all 100 North Carolina counties. In 2010, it received more than 2,000 applications for 500 scholarships.2
BUT FACING a severe budget shortfall in 2011, the NC General Assembly decided to phase out state funds for the Teaching Fellows.
Then, after enrollment in the state’s colleges of education cratered, legislators decided to restore the program – at least for aspiring teachers in STEM and special-education fields – in 2018.
Which begs the question of why legislators eliminated the program in the first place.
Though restoration of the program started with just five institutions, over time legislators have added institutions, so that there are now 10 that accept Teaching Fellows:
• Appalachian State University
• East Carolina University
• Elon University
• Fayetteville State University
• Meredith College
• N.C. A&T State University
• NC State University
• UNC Chapel Hill
• UNC Charlotte
• UNC Pembroke
JONES CITED several reasons for the dramatic increase in enrollment by aspiring teachers this year:
• The addition of Appalachian State and East Carolina universities in 2024;
• The addition of elementary education as a field of study within the program. “The addition of elementary education was huge,” Jones said, adding that elementary education is the top area for teacher licensure in the state. Elementary education accounts for 66% of students in the program’s 2024-25 cohort.
• And targeted recruitment efforts, including a window for early applicants.
NC STATE UNIVERSITY dominates enrollment of Teaching Fellows – it accounted for 41% of students in the program since reinstatement and 28% of new students in the program this year.
The demographics in the program are also revealing.
• Enrollment has been 85% female since the program’s restoration in 2018 and 87% female this year.
• In a state with a severe shortage of minority teachers, enrollment has been just 11% Black and 3% Hispanic since reinstatement, and 13% Black and 6% Hispanic this academic year.
No Historically Minority-Serving Institutions were included in the restored program until 2022-23, when the Commission that oversees the Teaching Fellows added N.C. A&T, Fayetteville State and UNC Pembroke. The Teaching Fellows are now seeing modest growth in minority enrollment, with 24% of this year’s class listed as minorities.
Applications for the 2025-26 academic year close on Feb. 28.3
2 https://www.ncforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/PSF_TeachingFellowsReport_HRsingles.pdf.
3 https://www.northcarolina.edu/apps/bog/doc.php?id=68282&code=bog, pp. 18-45.
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