College of Education Begins 2024-2025 with Another Rise in Undergraduate Enrollment; Teaching Fellows Welcome Largest Incoming Cohort in NC

The NC State College of Education opened the 2024-2025 academic year with 674 undergraduate students — its largest number of undergraduates in at least 10 years and the seventh straight year that the college’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from the previous year. Of those, 178 are new undergraduate students — a nearly 5 percent increase from last year and a 21 percent increase from five years ago. 

The new first-year and transfer undergraduate students come from 50 North Carolina counties and eight states, and over 80 percent of them are in a teacher preparation program.

“As a land-grant college of education, among our most important responsibilities are to prepare high-quality teachers for North Carolina and to attract more individuals to the profession,” said NC State College of Education Dean Paola Sztajn. “This is good news for North Carolina as we continue to enroll more and more undergraduates each year who plan to be teachers and who plan to stay in the profession and the state long after graduation.”

The new undergraduate students include 12 who make up the third cohort of the Transformational Scholarships Program, which provides scholarships of a minimum of $40,000 over four years to promising students from Eastern North Carolina who plan to return to the region to teach after graduating.

The new students also include 121 new Teaching Fellows — the largest cohort of new Teaching Fellows at NC State since the program returned in 2017 and the largest cohort in North Carolina. There are now 232 total Teaching Fellows at NC State, who comprise almost half of the 462 Teaching Fellows at institutions across North Carolina.

Students in the N.C. Teaching Fellows Program receive up to $10,000 per year in forgivable loans to teach science, technology, engineering, mathematics, elementary or special education. For each year of funding a Teaching Fellow receives, they commit to one year of service in a North Carolina public school classroom. 

“I feel so honored to be serving so many students this year who want to be a public school teacher in North Carolina,” said Crystal Espey, director of Teaching Fellows at NC State. “It is so uplifting and energizing to be around so many students who want to change the world, one classroom at a time.”

The influx of Teaching Fellows has helped support an increase in the College of Education’s total undergraduate enrollment over the past decade. Its fall enrollment of 674 undergraduate students marks a nearly 7 percent increase from last year and a 24 percent increase from 10 years ago.  

“Our growing undergraduate enrollment reflects the hard work of many faculty and staff across the college and all they have done to champion and support professional educators,” Sztajn said. “I think it also reflects the growing awareness of the extraordinary educators that our college prepares for North Carolina, as well as the transformative impact that teachers can make in the lives of others.”