This May will mark 14 years since I was selected to lead North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University as chancellor. Our university has changed tremendously over that relatively short span of time.

North Carolina A&T enrollment has grown by 27%, with the addition of 3,000 students to a student body that now numbers 13,487. The average GPA for entering freshmen students in fall 2022 is 3.77. Applications are up by 246% over the past decade alone. Research funding has more than doubled, growing by 62% over the past two years, and will exceed $100 million for the first time this fiscal year.

None of this was an accident. Our growth and development came during a time when many other mid-sized universities across the country, public and private, experienced challenges. We knew that if we were to move forward in a positive fashion, it would require intentionality and discipline.

In other words, a plan.

In 2011, we launched the first comprehensive strategic plan under my leadership. By 2018, our work had born significant fruit, so much so that we refreshed the plan, revising numerous goals upward. We have now launched our third strategic plan, Preeminence 2030: North Carolina A&T Blueprint, completed and approved earlier this year by our Board of Trustees. Implementation is in full swing.

Our work around these plans – the information gathering, vetting of ideas and ambitions, the necessary discipline of articulating our intentions, the commitment to execution and measurement and strategic investments in operations and campus facilities – has created a special regard for strategic planning at North Carolina A&T. Around our university, employees ranging from rank-and-file staff to senior management, know the name of our plan, the purposes behind it and how their work connects to it.

Dozens of administrative staff and faculty are being invited now to join divisional and college implementation teams that will allow us to distribute responsibility for executing the new plan throughout the university, expanding ownership of and commitment to the plan. The sense of teamwork and enthusiasm is palpable.

We have continued to realize outstanding outcomes built upon thoughtful, inclusive goals, strategies and tactics and a culture in which strategic planning is seen as valuable, consequential and essential.

We are energized about the future that awaits us.

- Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr.

Chancellor Martin speaks to strategic priorities at the 2022-23 Faculty Staff Institute.

North Carolina A&T’s new strategic plan, “Preeminence 2030: North Carolina A&T Blueprint,” reflects the vision and ambition of a university on the rise, with historic new possibilities that lie before it.

Structured around five streamlined goals, the plan is an outgrowth of academic and research areas of strength and impact, from health, transportation and housing equity to innovative systems design and development. The goals are:

• Transformative Engagement: Create partnerships and solutions that advance the human condition
• Leadership and Innovation: Develop engaged global thought leaders and innovators
• Performance Excellence: Optimize human and physical capital to drive elite performance and operational excellence
• Collaborative and Inclusive Culture: Foster an environment that values individualities and lived experiences so all are empowered to become their best selves
• Responsive Scholarship and Impact: Emerge as a global model for research, teaching, learning, outreach and innovation response to universal needs

Each goal is accompanied by five to eight strategies that spell out the university’s plans to <accomplish the goals’ intentions, as well as numerous metrics that will be used to measure progress and, ultimately, success.

Planners were also careful to note that the document is guided by A&T’s five core values – responsibility, excellence, integrity, inclusiveness and learning – and by a new initiative: The Aggie Experience. The latter was launched in 2022, and “recognizes [A&T’s] commitment to create a liberating and empowering experience for all and an environment that speaks to our right to be the very best.”

“The world is calling with many diverse challenges,” write Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. and Board of Trustees Chairwoman Hilda Pinnix-Ragland in their introduction to the plan. “Through this plan, we will answer that call in a spirit of agency that centers us as influencers, knowledge producers and thought leaders.”

Read the plan in its entirety on the North Carolina A&T website.

As part of President Joe Biden’s recent stop in Durham, N.C., to promote manufacturing, Wolfspeed and North Carolina A&T announced their partnership in a new proposed center that will focus on silicon carbide, a crystalline compound and semiconductor with great emerging promise in advanced compound chip manufacturing.

Wolfspeed and A&T are pursuing funding for the center through the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law last year by Biden. The statute provides $280 billion in funding to support research, development and manufacturing of semiconductors and boost the United States’ global leadership in the industry.

The center will be located in Greensboro at Gateway Research Park, a collaborative project of North Carolina A&T and UNC Greensboro. The park is already home to A&T’s nationally recognized research on autonomous cars, Core Technology’s advanced manufacturing operations, satellite operations of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering.

The center was announced during Biden’s Wolfspeed visit, which was also attended by Gov. Roy Cooper and U.S. Reps. Valerie Foushee and Wiley Nickel. It was the first stop on Biden’s “Investing in America” tour.

“Wolfspeed has been working with North Carolina A&T to develop a workforce of the future, and we are excited to expand that partnership to develop the technology of the future,” said Gregg Lowe, president and CEO of Wolfspeed. “The R&D facility will enable the next generation of innovators to explore new processes, applications and breakthrough advancements to support the global transition from silicon to silicon carbide technology and achieve new levels of sustainability and energy efficiency across a variety of industries.”

Wolfspeed has recognized A&T, one of the nation’s leading engineering institutions, as a critical component of the company’s talent development strategy. In 2020, Wolfspeed committed $4 million over five years to the HBCU, the single largest donation in the university’s history at the time, to create the Wolfspeed Endowed Scholars Program. In September 2022, the two entities announced a partnership to develop a comprehensive education and training curricula, including undergraduate and graduate credentials in silicon carbide semiconductor manufacturing, as well as training and career advancement programs for existing semiconductor manufacturing workers.

Most semiconductor chips are made from silicon, but silicon carbide offers significant advantages in efficiency. Wolfspeed already represents 60% of the worldwide silicon carbide wafer market, and has announced plans for a 445-acre facility in Siler, N.C., that is projected to employ more than 1,800 workers by 2030.

Read more at https://www.ncat.edu/news/2023/03/wolfspeed-chips.php.

Results from a new, comprehensive survey of North Carolina A&T constituents show that the university’s standing is rising significantly among state business leaders, top higher education officials, alumni and, perhaps most importantly, prospective students and their parents.

Conducted in January by the ADV Market Research & Consulting agency, the survey drew more than 4,200 individual responses. The largest single group of respondents were alumni – 1,873. But the six other target audiences had between 259 and 562 responses each. ADV reported a confidence factor of 4% to 4.5%. 

This was the first comprehensive brand survey undertaken by A&T, and it yielded a long list of significant, sometimes surprising findings, these three among the most significant:

• Across all respondent groups, “job placement rates for graduates” were considered the best measure of a university’s academic quality. That’s great news for A&T, which has some of the nation’s most popular career fairs and whose students earn the second-highest starting salaries of all campuses in the UNC System. It also helps explain why A&T is the top-choice university of out-of-state prospective students and their parents and top three for in-state students and parents.
  
  
• North Carolina business leaders rank A&T among the state’s four top public and private STEM universities. Two-thirds of them are interested in partnership with the university to meet their workforce needs and three-quarters described themselves as “likely to hire a North Carolina A&T graduate in the future.
  
  
• Higher education leaders rate A&T the no. 1 public HBCU in the nation. That’s due in part to their rising opinion of the university: 67% said their opinion of A&T is higher today than it once was.