UNC Greensboro is unveiling its own version of the Carolina Covenant.

UNCG today is announcing the UNCG Guarantee, a need-based financial aid program that will guarantee eligible students a college education with little or no debt.

The program will begin this fall and was created thanks to a $6 million gift from an anonymous donor - one of several such mysterious gifts that arrived on the doorsteps of various universities last year.

"The UNCG Guarantee gives us an enormous opportunity to enhance student success at UNCG, and especially for our students who need the most help financially," said Chancellor Linda Brady in a Tuesday press release.

The program, similar in concept to the Carolina Covenant program unveiled several years ago at UNC-Chapel Hill, will at first provide financial support to 30 to 40 first-year students. It is expected to fund 130 to 140 students over four years. But that's just about 12 percent of all the UNCG students who would qualify, and the university hopes to raise funds to expand the program in the future.

The application deadline is April 1. Students chosen for UNCG Guarantee will receive a financial aid package that includes funds from the program’s newly created Lula Martin McIver Scholarship Endowment and other private gifts, along with federal and state grants.

The aid package will include tuition and fees; on-campus room and board; and books, supplies and other educational expenses. Currently, $14,500 per year covers these costs for in-state students.

At UNC Greensboro, Tuesday's installation for Chancellor Linda Brady is being scaled back significantly to save money.

To that end - there will be no fancy cake made by some fancy cake-maker. The campus cafeteria will take care of it. Also, a planned buffet lunch for 1,600 will instead be punch and dessert.

And student government will distribute daisy seeds - the school flower - rather than commemorative mugs and T-shirts.

The bash should run about $22,000, according to this report in the Greensboro News & Record. 

By comparison - At UNC Chapel Hill last year, the installation for Chancellor Holden Thorp ran $162,000, paid for by non-state funds.

UNC Greensboro has received the largest gift in its history, a $6 million donation given anonymously.

The money is to be used for scholarships and professorships, the university has announced.

 "This gift holds enormous potential for UNCG to enhance student access and to recruit and retain top faculty,” said UNCG Chancellor Linda P. Brady in a press release. “The growth of scholarship funds is vital in today’s turbulent economy and it has been the primary objective of our Students First Campaign. This gift also represents the margin of excellence in the recruitment and retention of the very best faculty. Our donor has done a huge service to UNCG, and the university is indeed grateful."

 More from the university release:

The donor has designated $5 million to provide financial assistance to students. This gift will go a long way in the current economic climate to enhance UNCG’s scholarship program, which awarded only $1.6 million in need-based scholarships in 2007-08.

 

More than 60 percent of UNCG’s 17,000-plus student body receives financial aid – a total of $42.7 million awarded in grants and scholarships for 2007-08 and a total of $125 million in aid from all sources – with the bulk coming from federal and state sources. Beyond the total awarded, there was an unmet need last year of more than $30 million which required students to take out over $75 million in loans to support their education.

UNCG administrators are designating the remaining $1 million to create two distinguished professorships. For each new professorship, the donor’s contribution of $417,000 will allow UNCG to request matching funds of $250,000 from the C.D. Spangler Foundation, Inc., and $333,000 from the N.C. Distinguished Professorship Endowment Trust Fund. These generous matches allow UNCG to more than double the value of the donor’s $1 million donation.

“We are thrilled with this gift and deeply moved by the generosity and vision of the donor,” Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Patricia W. Stewart said. “As economic forecasts are increasingly stormy, this gift for scholarships and faculty development will be an extraordinary investment in UNCG’s future. It is impossible to calculate the benefits that will result.”

Supporters of UNCG have created 14 new professorships and 230 scholarship funds – two of the campaign’s top initiatives during the past four years.

Brady has made access to higher education one of her top priorities since arriving at UNCG as chancellor, and she has put her energies behind raising scholarship funds. Like those of many campuses nationally, UNCG’s scholarship endowments have been shrinking in the harsh economic environment, and caused a reduction in the amounts the university can award students.

Including the latest gift, the campaign has received gifts of $60.7 million toward a goal of $66.26 million for student support. The goal includes $61.31 million for undergraduate and graduate scholarships, $3.8 million for international education, and $1.15 million for the Communication Across the Curriculum program.

As you may recall, we reported here recently on UNC Greensboro's desire to create a new pharmacy school. It would be just the second public pharmacy school in North Carolina.

It looks like UNCG's proposal is gaining momentum in Greensboro, where civic boosters think a new pharmacy school will give the local economy a needed shot in the arm. 

In an editorial, the Greensboro News & Record urges the city to get behind UNCG's plans, which require the approval of the UNC system's Board of Governors - no sure thing. And it appears some local foundations are lining up behind the idea.

Of concern to some at UNC Chapel Hill - which has the state's only public pharmacy school - is how a new school would amp up the demand for a limited number of spaces where students would get their clinical practice experience.

But in the News & Record article, Tim Rice, who runs the Moses Cone Health System in Greensboro, believes there are enough sites available.

UNC-Greensboro is making its pitch to become just the second public university in the state with a pharmacy school.

UNCG chancellor Linda Brady believes a new pharmacy school would ease a statewide pharmacist shortage and would not create competition with UNC-Chapel Hill, which currently operates the only pharmacy school within the UNC system.

Currently, the state’s drugstores, hospitals and other employers need more pharmacists than UNC-CH and the state’s other two pharmacy schools — at Campbell University in Buies Creek and Wingate University, near Charlotte, can produce. And Brady believes a new pharmacy school in her region would spark economic growth in the Triad.

"There really seems to be a major gap in terms of the need and what’s available,” Brady said recently.

But at a time when UNC system leaders are cutting budgets, a costly new venture may be a tough sell, even if UNCG can prove the demand for new pharmacists exists.

“It will take some convincing,” said Harold Martin, the UNC system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs.  “We will look at balancing compelling need against cost.”

A 2002 study by the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-CH found that the number of retail pharmacists per 10,000 citizens was decreasing even as the state’s population and the demand for prescription drugs was rising.  And In 2005, a medical news magazine reported that chain drugstores across the nation had 6,000 unfilled pharmacy positions, according to a memo UNCG has submitted to the UNC system as part of its request for a new pharmacy school. (Click on attachment to read memo)

But the situation is changing, argues Robert Blouin, dean of UNC Chapel Hill’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy. The state’s weak economy and a lessening demand from retail pharmacies will lead to decreased demand in coming years, Blouin said, citing a recent decision by the Walgreens pharmacy chain to lay off 1,000 administrative workers.

“For a public university, we have to be responsive to a need,” Blouin said. “When you look at the demand equation, it’s changing. It has changed dramatically in the last six months.”

UNCG has not yet said precisely what the new venture would cost. But the university would hire at least 20 new faculty members and enroll 75 to 100 students per class, Brady said. Little vacant space exists to build on the UNCG campus so a refurbished downtown Greensboro space is the more likely location, she added.

One key in the decision-making process: Are there enough learning opportunities at pharmacies, hospitals and other health care sites in the Greensboro area to accommodate pharmacy students from UNCG and UNC-CH? The latter already places students into these on-the-job training sites in that area and around the state.

“There are many clinical sites in the Triad so we would not be competing head to head with Chapel Hill for those sites,” Brady said. “We’re confident there are sufficient sites.”

UNC-CH chancellor Holden Thorp said he and Brady are “on the same page” but still must be convinced.

“We’ll have a lot of work to do to make sure we have enough clinical sites,” he said. “It’s been proven to me that they’re willing to work through it with us.”

Fred Eckel, executive director of the N.C. Association of Pharmacists, isn’t so sure about the availability of those practice locations.

“We’re not growing clinical sites to the extent that enrollments are growing,” Eckel said. “Three pharmacy schools in North Carolina have pretty much filled up our state’s practice sites ... you add another school into the mix, it just complicates that whole process.”

In 2002, a plan for a new pharmacy school at Elizabeth City State University — also a UNC system campus — was shelved after a consultant’s report showed the venture would be very costly. It eventually became a joint program through which students at Elizabeth City take UNC-CH pharmacy courses using distance education.

Martin, the UNC system vice president, said the Elizabeth City model may be a less costly alternative in this case as well.

Brady, the UNCG chancellor, believes the demand is evident. UNC-CH recently received 800 applications for 155 spots in one of its incoming classes, while WIngate received 1,112 applications for 70 seats, according to the UNCG memo.

Since 2000, 28 new pharmacy schools have opened across the nation, including one — Wingate — in North Carolina, according to data from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

Documents:

The economic slowdown and demands that state agencies cut 3 percent from their current budgets are having a tangible effect at UNC Greensboro, where a new building for the School of Education has been put on hold.

Planning and design for the new, 110,000-square-foot, $47 million facility will continue but construction — expected to start next spring — will be delayed. The building was to open in fall of 2011, Chancellor Linda Brady said in a press release.

The release did not say how long the delay would last. The 3 percent budget cut is in addition to a cut of almost 1 percent imposed at the start of the fiscal year as a result of the state's revenue shortfall.

"I hope this will be the extent of the cuts, but it is very possible that we will be asked to absorb further cuts this year or next," Brady said.