Esha Shah ’22 knew a number of the courses they had completed at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics-Durham would transfer to East Carolina University. For years, NCSSM has had articulation agreements with a number of universities in the UNC System in which certain NCSSM classes were considered equivalent to courses within a given university’s catalog.

But transfer credits weren’t at the forefront of Shah’s mind when they selected their NCSSM classes. “I pretty much just took whatever I was interested in,” Shah says, “and whatever transferred, great!”

More than 40 hours of that course work carried over. When they finally stepped onto campus for their first class at ECU, just three short months after graduating from high school, Shah was technically in their third year of university. 

“Honestly, I expected to have my general eds out of the way, or the majority of them,” Shah says, “but I didn’t expect to enter as a junior.”

Like Shah, Connor Bost ’23 selected his NCSSM courses based more on personal interest than what might carry over to college. Still, UNC-Chapel Hill granted him credit for dozens of hours, allowing him to enter college as a second semester sophomore.

“The registrar’s office at NCSSM was very clear with me that some schools don’t take all the articulation that we offer, but they were very clear, too, that there would be a lot of articulation at the in-state colleges, which was definitely an exciting and an appealing thing to me,” Bost says.” A lot of my general education requirements were knocked out, and I never had to take my physics general eds or my chemistry general ed. That was really fantastic for me.” 

In the decade or so prior to Shah and Bost’s graduation from NCSSM-Durham, the school’s articulation agreements had remained fairly static. A lot changed at NCSSM in that time, however. The school switched from trimesters to semesters, changed course numbers and graduation requirements, and developed a strategic plan to guide decision making in the coming years. With so many important changes, NCSSM’s newest registrar, Jennifer Betz, was empowered to rethink the agreements as well. In early 2021 she got started.

It was a labor-intensive task, one that Betz had to squeeze in among all her other day-to-day duties. NCSSM-Morganton was also in the process of opening, and a considerable amount of her energies were directed towards that. Still, she stuck with it.

“What I did was I created a spreadsheet, and I called it the Course Equivalency Matrix,” Betz says of the initial process. “I put in a tab for every school [in the UNC System], and in those tabs I put in the current articulation agreement, the conditions by which each school had been accepting courses, and those courses’ equivalencies.”

Attached to that, Betz added nearly the entire course catalog for NCSSM with every course’s four digit number. She also included the syllabi for every 4000 level and higher NCSSM course. There were more than 100.

“I shared that with all of the registrars across the system,” Betz says, “and I asked every school to take a year and evaluate it and let us know what would be accepted and what wouldn’t.”

By year’s end, about half of the universities had responded. Betz continued to make her pitch at the monthly registrars’ meetings she attended, but still the process sputtered along. At a bi-annual in-person meeting of registrars, she discovered why as she sat in on a session about transfer credits between universities.

“A representative of one of the universities had been talking about what a student has to do when they matriculate into their school to get transfer credit,” Betz recalls. “At the end I raised my hand and said, ‘Is this what NCSSM students will have to do for their transfer credit?’ And the person presenting said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t take high school credit.’ It was at that moment that I realized that, though we might have this fantastic, stellar relationship among academics, that does not mean that people that work in the registrars’ offices know who we are. It seemed like something I needed to fix. Registrars are the people that we need to be our initial advocates, to sort of move these articulation agreements down the line and get them reviewed and approved by the academic departments.”

Betz returned from that meeting with an idea. What if, she asked Katie O’Connor, NCSSM’s Provost & Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs, NCSSM asked to host the next in-person registrars’ meeting. That way, registrars at every university in the UNC System would get a first-hand look at NCSSM; a “home field advantage,” Betz called it. O’Connor agreed.

In March 0f 2023, NCSSM-Durham hosted the event for the first time since becoming the 17th member of the UNC System. It was, Betz says, the first time in a long time that representatives from all 16 UNC System universities were in attendance.

NCSSM’s Chancellor, Todd Roberts, gave a history of the school and its mission to the nearly 70 attendees. Student ambassadors gave tours of the school, visiting science labs and classrooms so the visitors could actually see students at work. Registrars also visited NCSSM’s Fabrication Lab and viewed academic poster sessions and the school’s science and humanities research journals.

Throughout, Betz listened as attendees asked questions of the student ambassadors. Did students actually live on campus? What grades did the school serve?

That NCSSM remained unfamiliar to so many is not a surprise. NCSSM has always been an institution occupying a unique place, having previously occupied for years a space between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and the UNC System.

As understanding began to settle in, registrars on the tour gathered around a wall-mounted pinboard displaying a map of the United States and a map of North Carolina. On them, pins of different colors noted where NCSSM graduates attended college. University reps pointed to their schools, excited to see themselves represented. That is where, Betz says, NCSSM’s role as a pipeline of incredibly talented students to the UNC System crystalised among the group.

“They went from getting here in the morning, not really knowing much about us, to – by one o’clock in the afternoon – being playfully competitive with each other around that pinboard about who got our students.”

How that event changed things. NCSSM now has brand-new articulation agreements with every university in the UNC System. Though the number of courses that will transfer varies from school to school,  some schools accept more than 100 NCSSM courses for credit if a student maintains at least a B to B- average in them. UNC-Chapel Hill even has a dedicated page on their website specifically for students transferring credit from NCSSM. Even more promising is that the agreements will no longer remain static; every few years the agreements will be revisited to potentially accommodate new courses created in the NCSSM curriculum. Betz and her team are working on adding an equivalency finder to NCSSM’s website so students can compare as they make their enrollment decisions.

The end result is that, when coupled with the eight semesters of tuition granted to NCSSM graduates by the state  (room and board are still the responsibility of students and their families), NCSSM graduates now have more reasons than ever to continue their education in North Carolina post-high school. That’s a boon for North Carolina overall, of course, but also an often overlooked opportunity for students; many NCSSM students, depending on how many courses transfer, will be able to double major, or even double major and complete a minor, in the same amount of time it would take to earn a single degree.

Or, if they choose, they can also graduate from college in as little as two years.

Instead of graduating early, Bost decided to stick with the standard four-year course of study and added a second major. He will graduate with a major in environmental science, another in business, and a minor in Applied Sciences and Engineering.

“I’m in no rush to get out of here,” he says. “Had I wanted to, I could have, with maybe a summer course or two, graduated in two years, which would have been awesome. But I’m happy getting all this additional education. It feels pretty great.”

Shah was on track to graduate in two years from East Carolina, but a mid-course shift in majors added a year. They’re now working on a major in psychology and a minor in composite natural sciences. They’ve also applied to an accelerated master’s program in business. 

It wouldn’t have been possible without the work Betz and the NCSSM’s registrar’s office put in, Shah says.

“I ended up sending Ms. Betz an email, right after I realized how many credits would transfer, and just thanked her for everything that they did to make that happen.”