Many magazine readers will be familiar by now with the North Carolina Gateway to Wake Forest. The basics: Starting this fall, students who enroll at Wake Forest from North Carolina with household incomes of $100,000 to $200,000 can expect their financial aid to cover tuition. And those with family incomes of $200,000 to $300,000 receive financial aid that covers half of their tuition.
I was thrilled when I heard the announcement. But by the time we were producing this issue, I had some lingering questions about how Wake Forest could make this happen and what it would mean. So this spring, I spent the morning with Eric Maguire, vice president for enrollment, and asked him those questions directly.
In our conversation, he described Wake Forest as the ideal of a modern university. “If you were creating an institution from scratch today, it would look a lot like Wake Forest University,” he said, ticking off the ingredients: A beautiful campus, a charming Southern city, rich traditions, small class sizes, dedicated faculty, Power Four athletics, career services, a strong alumni base and a unifying mission. “Very few institutions check all those boxes.”
But despite efforts in recent years by the University to shore up scholarship availability, the dream school felt increasingly out of reach for many excellent students. So, spurred by President Wente’s call at the beginning of her tenure to focus on affordability and access initiatives, Maguire and the financial aid office came up with what is now the North Carolina Gateway Initiative. While we will not have final admission numbers until the fall, the initial results in this year’s admissions cycle were encouraging. Here are three highlights from our conversation.
1. North Carolina applications are way up
Interest in Wake Forest has ballooned in recent years, so it wasn’t surprising that this cycle saw yet another record-breaking number of applications. But the most noticeable growth this cycle came from within the state.
“We saw over a 75% increase in applications from North Carolina this year,” Maguire said. The most striking anecdote he cited: “We are receiving applications from schools in North Carolina that we haven’t received an application in five-plus years from. And not only are they sending us some of their students for the first time in a number of years, but they’re sending us their best and their brightest.”
2. The University has been laying the groundwork for this for years
A frequent question I hear is about how Wake Forest can afford to make this promise. Maguire said it took years of planning, and an increase in philanthropic support spearheaded by the University Advancement team, to make it possible. “So my thanks to our alumni and our parents and our friends at the University who’ve contributed over the last number of years,” he said.
Prior to the Gateway’s launch, “We were doing a good job of meeting family need and providing strong financial aid packages and reducing student indebtedness.” Maguire said that meant that “a portion of these resources were already in place. But there are some additional costs that are associated with the Gateway. … That delta was really filled with philanthropic support.”
3. Expansion beyond North Carolina? It’s possible.
Maguire and the team working on the Gateway considered applying the scholarship to the broader applicant pool. But ultimately, he said, it made sense to start with in-state applicants for a few reasons. One was to build philanthropic funding to support it. The second was to understand if it would work as intended.
“My hope is that over the next couple of years, we’re able to really make sure that within North Carolina, the Gateway is achieving what we want to achieve, that it’s improving access, improving affordability for our students. And then once we have some confidence in our ability to do that, then we can have that discussion about potentially scaling that more nationally,” Maguire said.
