By David Rice
Executive Editor
Public Ed Works
RALEIGH (November 20, 2025) – At last, there’s some good news for North Carolina’s teacher workforce.
Enrollment in the NC Teaching Fellows program, which offers forgivable college loans to aspiring teachers who teach certain subjects, continues to climb dramatically.
Dr. Ashton Clemmons, Associate Vice President of the UNC System, told a UNC Board of Governors committee yesterday that 974 students across UNC System institutions are enrolled in the program this year. The UNC System partners with 18 NC school districts to recruit students to the Teaching Fellows.
And more than 85% of its graduates repay their loans through teaching in our state’s public schools, she said.
Another effort, the Future Teachers of North Carolina, offers on-campus college experiences to high-school juniors and seniors who might want to become teachers. The program had 432 applications last year, Clemmons said, up from 207 the previous year.1
PROMPTED BY a report from The Public School Forum of North Carolina, the Teaching Fellows program began in 1986 and put thousands of teachers into our state’s public schools.
But the state’s General Assembly ended funding for the program during the budget crisis of 2011.
“With declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs at our state’s colleges and universities and increasing numbers of teachers retiring, moving to other states or leaving the classroom altogether, the loss of this highly effective teacher recruitment effort will certainly be felt across North Carolina,” Keith Poston, President and Executive Director of the Public School Forum, said when the last class of fellows in the original program graduated in 2015.2
And boy, was it felt.
Enrollment in teacher-prep programs fell precipitously, and the state still struggles to recruit teachers, with districts in Northeastern North Carolina hiring teachers from Jamaica and the Philippines.3
Which begs the question about why state legislators thought it was so wise to stop supporting the Teaching Fellows in the first place. Apparently recognizing their blunder, they began restoring the program in 2017, though in limited fields of study.
It doesn’t help that North Carolina has now sunk to 43rd in the nation in average teacher pay. And North Carolina remains the only state in the Union that hasn’t adopted a budget for 2025-26, even though the fiscal year started more than four months ago on July 1.
So state legislators shouldn’t pat themselves on the back just yet.
STILL, MEMBERS of the UNC System Board of Governors were pleased to see the Teaching Fellows enrollment figures.
“This makes my heart happy,” said Wendy Murphy, the board’s Chair. “I feel the university should be the educator of teachers, because they’re going to educate our future students.
“It’s so important.”
And Board member John Fraley connected the dots with North Carolina’s economy.
“I’m a firm believer that if we don’t have an educated teacher in every classroom, we’re not going to have an educated workforce in North Carolina,” he said.
[1] https://www.northcarolina.edu/apps/bog/doc.php?id=68600&code=bog, pp. 5-15.
[3] https://hechingerreport.org/federal-policies-risk-worsening-an-already-dire-rural-teacher-shortage/.
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