- Hello, I'm David Crabtree, and in just a moment, we will hear from Dr. Philip Rogers, the Chancellor of East Carolina University.

We'll talk about his vision for this 118-year-old institution.

- [Announcer] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[charming music] [charming music continues] - Welcome, everyone.

We are here with Chancellor Philip Rogers at East Carolina University.

Chancellor, thanks for having us in.

And we are specifically in one of the labs in the School of Dental Medicine.

This is really big for all of Eastern North Carolina as well as ECU.

- Well, it is indeed, David.

Thank you very much for being here with us today.

We're always proud to have you on the campus of East Carolina University, and this is a special place, not just for ECU, but for me personally.

Good news is we don't have any drills here today, so you don't need to be nervous.

- Thank you, thank you.

- [Philip] We're here to have a conversation.

- I keep looking for that sign that says, we cater to cowards, you know?

- [laughs] Well, we'll take good care of you along the way.

This is indeed a special building.

This is one of many dental facilities here in the state for East Carolina University, and this is the home base right here in Greenville, North Carolina.

We like to think of our dental school as having four layers.

The first layer is related to our patients who come to see us in our clinic and our first year students.

The second layer, second level, is related to our second year students.

Third level is the layer we're on here today where we do a lot of pre-lab and simulation work.

And then the fourth layer is broken up into eight pieces and extended all the way out throughout all of North Carolina into rural areas where we send our faculty and our students to provide care in the most underserved parts of the state.

And so this school is our mission in action.

- And this school, I noticed coming down the hallway, the composites of many of the students from all across the state.

I mean, there's real pride from where you're pulling students, and I would think it's very competitive to get into this school.

- It is, and the design is quite intentional, because we know that if we can go out into rural areas of this state, particularly areas that need dentists the most, when we first envisioned this concept of bringing a school of dental medicine to ECU, I was actually in the chief of staff role here more than a decade ago.

And the idea was that if we go out to those rural areas and bring those students from the rural areas to ECU and let them train here, they've developed relationships, they have family members, they have a cultural connection to these areas where our service learning centers are.

And it is just incredible to see them graduate from this place and then go back to their home communities and serve those communities in ways in which we never could have imagined.

There were four counties in North Carolina with no dentist when we started this school, as I said earlier.

- You know, it's so amazing because for so many of us, we take something like dental care for granted.

In fact, we may wanna put it off at times just to avoid the anxiety of it.

And yet there's so many people in this state that haven't been served.

And obviously that's part of your mission to be able to get to those folks.

- It absolutely is.

We've now served over a hundred thousand patients in our dental school.

And I think of the young children who go to sleep at night not having brushed their teeth with sugar on those teeth, and they wake up with cavities, and then we expect them to go to school and to learn in our public school systems and to be able to perform, to get good grades, to behave in those environments.

And that's hard to do when you're not taking care of your teeth and taking care of your body.

And part of what we were designed to do from a missional standpoint at ECU is focus on student success, which we do quite well here at the School of Dental Medicine and our medical school and every other part of campus.

But we also place a premium on public service and on regional transformation.

And so while we focus on student success when those students are here, we send them out into the world to transform those areas that need it the most.

And that's part of what we were built to do as a university.

- Wow, Chancellor, I worked in this market back in the 1980s.

I can remember the size of East Carolina at that time.

I remember the early days of the med school.

And over the years now we look back and see what a difference that school in particular has made for the eastern part of the state.

- Well, that is regional transformation at its best as well.

And when you drove into Greenville on 264 today, one of the first visuals that you see is this massive health center that's one of the largest health systems in the country now, which is ECU Health.

And that's been a partnership that began when the famous long-serving 18-year-chancellor Leo Jenkins envisioned bringing a medical school to East Carolina University.

And he won that opportunity with great passion and advocacy.

And for more than 40 years now, we have been the home base for rural healthcare in Eastern North Carolina.

And we're continuing to innovate and advance around that space each and every day.

And the next great iteration of it was the formation of ECU Health where we brought together our local health system with the Brody School of Medicine with a very focused and specific strategy to ensure that we could create a comprehensive model of rural healthcare that would be the model for the nation.

And it's amazing to see the number of institutions around the country that call us and say, how did you pull that off, how did you do it?

And we're seeing results that are backing it up.

- One more thing about the med school.

Dr. Jenkins was a fighter, and that was a major fight to get the school here.

In President Friday's books, he talks about his opposition, but when he lost that battle, he said, we're going to make it one of the best medical schools in the country.

- And I would describe it as the highest value medical school in the country, because we know where we are in this rural region east of I-95.

It's one of the reasons why we keep our medical school tuition as one of the lowest in the country, because we know that students need to come into this institution, and they need to leave it with as minimal debt as possible.

And then to be able to be incentivized to go back in those areas and provide care.

We have more than 1.4 million patients across Eastern North Carolina.

And our job is to produce the health sciences workforce to ensure that this region thrives now and into the future.

And through nursing and dentistry and health sciences and through all of our other academic schools, we're proud to do that.

We're proud to be an anchor institution in a community that we love in a region we love.

- How many students will you have this fall?

- We expect across the 27,000 mark this fall.

And we'll have 21-1/2, 22,000 undergraduates.

And the remaining are graduate students in various fields.

And we're excited to welcome in a new group of ECU students.

- And they're coming from all over the country.

but with a concentration in North Carolinians.

- Absolutely.

They come from all over the country and frankly all over the world to East Carolina University, students from all 100 counties.

We're beginning to, in a very strategic way, expand our out-of-state student population.

We've seen that increase by 33% over the last five years.

We've seen our out-of-state, excuse me, our international student population increase by almost 25% over the last five years.

And so our goal is to make sure that any qualified North Carolinian that wants a seat at ECU, that we provide it to 'em.

And then that we also go out to different parts of our country and our world and bring in individuals from outside of the state of North Carolina, connect 'em to the Greenville and North Carolina community, and hopefully get 'em a great job back in the states that we add to the economic vitality of our state.

- It's hard to walk through an airport without being reminded of your online program.

It's not, it's hard to drive down an interstate and not be reminded of your MBA program, whatever it may be.

Things have, I mean, that type of evolution was happening when you were here as chief of staff, but it's also been a meteoric move, has it not?

- It absolutely has.

And it was happening at ECU before it was happening anywhere else.

We were one of the early movers in the online education space.

- And why was that?

- You know, I think our leadership during that time recognized that ECU was a place that was focused on innovation, that was ready to build the technological infrastructure during a time in which we felt like we could reach more students from an online learning standpoint, that the market was there.

And so that was something that the leadership invested in and that we began to sustain, and we had the infrastructure and the people that understood and had the foresight to look forward to see that it was something that could add value.

And I think that speaks to the very essence of what ECU has done since its founding.

We've evolved to meet the state's needs.

We were founded as a teacher's training school back in 1907 as a way to meet the needs of the state of North Carolina.

We evolved to become East Carolina College, which was a need to expand our undergraduate programs to be able to meet the needs of the state at that time.

We needed more education professionals beyond just teachers.

We needed more business leaders and entrepreneurial thought leaders.

We needed nurses.

And so the institution adapted to meet those needs.

In 1967, we became East Carolina University where our core health science programs began to take off.

And in the late '90s and early 2000s, online education was something that we felt like we could put a stake in the market and really own it.

And you know, I think one of the challenges is that, when you put a stake in the ground or a flag in the ground, you have to continue to find a way to be iteratively adaptive and reinvent around it.

And for a period of time, especially as we came through the COVID pandemic years, there were other institutions that caught up and that began to move in this particular space.

And thanks to the good leadership in the North Carolina General Assembly and the system office, ECU's also been a first mover in the Project Kitty Hawk space.

And we've, over the last couple of years, launched four online programs in that market, which are producing the most number of students through the Project Kitty Hawk platform.

And we're on target to reach, gosh, close to 650, beginning of the fall, which is a big boost to our enrollment.

And it just gives us an opportunity to reach a different type of learner in the adult market and to be able to serve those needs that are so intense in our state.

- You've got 21,000 undergraduates be here this fall.

How many of those would be freshmen?

- Well, we expect to have a freshman class most likely around 4,100 to 4,200 students.

And those will be first-time first-year students.

When you add on to that, our transfer students, which is another 1,500 to 1,600 new students coming in and bringing back our continuing students, you have a nice broad mix of various different types of learners that will take on the ECU experience.

- And you'll have first-generation students.

- You know, one of the things I love the most, and if anyone listening or watching has been to an ECU commencement ceremony, one of the things that I do is I ask all of our graduates to stand up based on how they approach their ECU educational journey.

And so we get to a point in the ceremony where I say, will all first-generation graduates please stand to be recognized, and inevitably, nearly half of the audience stands up.

And there's no other part of our commencement ceremony that people who have attended it or watched it online mention more than that one, 'cause it strikes right to the heart of why higher education exists in our state and in our country, which is to help someone through the promise of opportunity to get a college degree that they wouldn't have otherwise had a chance to do.

And that's something that I take very personally.

- Understood and valued and respected.

Out of those 4,000, 4,400 students, how many, I know you're hopeful that all would graduate, but that's not reality.

Your graduation rate, you expect it to be for this incoming class.

- Yeah, for this, it improves every year.

And I think that's the most important message to take away from this.

While it's pretty consistent across universities that look like ECU to have a graduation rate, that four-year graduation rate that ranges up to around 50%, 48% to 50%.

I think it's really important contextually to take into mind the fact that every student walks in to these doors at ECU from a different perspective and a different way of life.

And so we have online students that are working sometimes full-time jobs, and they can only take a certain number of hours, and it takes them a little bit longer to graduate at times, Today's students walk in the door from high school with credits from community colleges and AP exams, and so they may graduate in three years because they come in with sophomore level status.

We have others that may have financial hardships that need to go out and get a part-time job to build up the resources to be able to continue their educational experience.

And so while we're always working to improve our graduation rates at the four-year level and get those to as high of level as possible, 'cause that helps with an affordability standpoint.

We're also mindful of the broader context in which our students come to us.

Now over the last decade, we've seen our graduation rates at ECU increase by seven percentage points.

It's almost a 18% overall increase, which has defined trends across various parts of higher education.

And so student success is the number one priority in our mission statement.

We've recently launched a student success plan that ensures that we wrap around our students, our continuing students, all the resources they need to graduate in four years.

And that graduation rate and the retention rate number, we're at about a 83% retention rate.

That's the signal that we're leveraging our resources in a strategic and appropriate way for the state of North Carolina.

- Wow.

Look, a generation ago I was a five-year student.

[both laughing] You know, whether it was work or whatever the reasons for it, it just took a little longer.

At the same time I was able to experience the value, the intrinsic value of a four-year education.

I know not everyone has that opportunity.

I know not every student, potential student is created for that.

But talk with us a bit about how you view the intangible value of being at a university and completing a four-year degree.

- Well, it's something that is questioned by the general public every day.

If you look at the Gallup polling data over the last, let's say decade or so, back in 2015, the general public asked in a survey format what their confidence rating in higher education might be, was close to 60%.

And if you fast forward to 2023, nationally speaking, that's declined almost 20 percentage points down in the mid thirties now.

And so that's from a challenge standpoint, that's a concern for all of us in higher education, regardless of whether you're a private, public, two-year, four-year, accredited degree granting institution.

That's something that we all have to work hard each and every day to better affirm and strengthen the public's trust in higher education, and reduce those what I often call panic-inducing headlines that students and parents see that may sway them away from a university experience.

I would encourage anybody with those thoughts to come and give ECU a good faith experience and try, because we are focused on educating the student in a holistic way, ensuring that they graduate with as minimal debt as possible, and then getting them out of this institution in a timely nature that meets their needs so that they go out and get a good job and contribute to society in a meaningful way.

In and of itself, that's inherently what higher education is all about.

And that's what we strive to do.

And whether you're at our Coastal Studies Institute for a semester exploring research on the coast, whether you're in the Dental Service Learning Center in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, or whether you're in Certaldo, Italy, on our ECU Tuscany campus, the ECU experience is one that is gonna provide a strong return on investment to the people that we serve.

And I think that's a message to send to people.

96% of our undergraduate programs provide a positive return on investment.

92% of our graduate programs do.

And so if you invest a dollar in ECU, you're gonna earn it back through your economic time over the course of your life.

- Any successful model, it gets to that point of success because they had to deal with challenges.

As you continue to grow, what do you consider the greatest challenge here?

- I think you hit on one in this last question, which is how do we demonstrate and communicate the value of a higher education degree to the people that we serve?

And how do you communicate to the broader society and the broader region that we were built for them, whether it's providing healthcare experiences, whether it's providing jobs and connections to business and to industry.

I think there's a messaging narrative that has to be honed across all of public higher education that speaks directly to the people that we serve so that they understand we were built for them.

Beyond that, our country is navigating a period of time of demographic change.

We're experiencing a demographic shift that will evolve beginning in 2027.

And I really think the universities that will survive and thrive through that period are the ones that are looking 5 to 10 years down the road.

They're modeling their institutions from a financial perspective to ensure that they're ready to take on that curve that will happen.

And they're also constantly reinventing themselves around what the market related demands are for the individuals that consume the higher education experience.

And so we're spending a lot of time right now thinking about what are the degree programs that the next generation of learners are going to want to pursue, and how do we prepare our faculty and our staff and our students and our campus to be able to deliver those in a way that will add value into the future.

- You grew up here.

- Two miles away.

- You're a preacher's son.

- Guilty as charged.

- Growing up, I used to say, used to be told watch out for the preacher's boy.

- We're the troublemakers.

- Okay, you know.

I don't think that's who you are, but what was it like growing up in that spotlight with your father being the pastor of a major Baptist church here?

- He was, he was the pastor of a major Baptist church here in Greenville for more than 40 years.

And as any PK knows, it's like growing up in a glass house.

Everybody knows your name, everybody knows what you're doing.

- And they're watching you closely, aren't they?

- And they're always watching.

And it's not that different than growing up as a chancellor's son.

And so I apologize to my two boys often to say, I'm sorry that you're in this limelight, but I promise it's for a good purpose, and it's to serve an important need for our state.

You know, reflectively speaking, I found that growing up as a pastor son probably was one of the best training grounds for becoming a college president that I could have ever imagined.

You have to be a diplomat, you have to be an advocate, you have to be a mentor, you have to be able to bring people together around a set of values.

You have to be an expert in all kinds of different things related to church life or related to university life, whether it's finances or enrollment or athletics.

I told the search committee when I was applying for this job that the only thing they missed in the qualifications for the next chancellor of ECU was the ability to walk on water.

And there's the Tar River just a mile away from here.

And maybe I should learn that skillset as well.

- If you do, let know how that works out.

- But the values you learn in terms of how to bring people together, the fact that pastors have a lot of different stakeholders that they have to mobilize towards a common vision and a common set of goals was an excellent learning opportunity for me.

- [David] How about listening?

- Listening is perhaps one of the most important qualities of doing this work, because I was gone for 10 years, working at the American Council in Education in Washington, DC as a senior vice president.

And even though I grew up in this community, my wife, my mother, my father-in-law, my great-grandmother was one of the early students at East Carolina Teachers Training School.

I know this place really, really well, but I didn't want to take for granted the fact that maybe the culture had changed a little bit while I was away in DC.

And so I really placed a high level of importance on listening in those first six months to a year to make sure that I understood where the hearts of the people were when I walked in the door.

- I wanna go back to a couple of things.

Talk about challenges.

The health and wellbeing of the students is uppermost in your mind, part of the core of the health and wellbeing is the mental health of the students.

So I've got to think that will always be a challenge.

But the training you had, again, I used the word intrinsic.

The intrinsic training you had in a home where faith was front and center has allowed you to see the landscape of mental health in young people, perhaps differently than others.

- Yeah, you learn that you have to meet people where they are.

Sometimes you have students or leaders across the institution that needs someone that they can resonate with, needs someone that they feel has an open door that they can connect with and communicate with and in an authentic way.

And I think the bottom line that we've inserted into our strategic plan that builds on the values that you're describing is that what we essentially wanna create at ECU is a culture of care where everyone who walks in these doors knows that we're gonna have their backs and we're gonna help them succeed and thrive and get from point A to point B.

Whether that's a personal challenge they're working through, an academic challenge, navigating the next step in their career journey.

And I think you have to, not only bring a servant's heart, a listening ear, you have to bring a sense of compassion and kindness to put yourself in other people's shoes and to lead in a way where you can meet people where they are and help them navigate that journey together.

- You represent Pirate Nation.

So you ever wear a patch?

- I haven't worn a patch, but I do walk around with my finger like this quite often and it looks like a pirate hook.

And people seem to like that.

- That mean, it's the ar, that's what people talk, right?

We have a special arg.

- Arg with the G. Okay, I wanna know how I could be a part of ECU Tuscany.

I did not know you had a campus in Italy.

- Well, I think we need a special PBS feature on the ground in Italy, just outside of Florence, where we really do, it's been running since 2008.

We have ECU faculty on the ground.

When you take a class in the ECU Tuscany program, you get the same experience and credit hours that you get as if you're sitting on our campus here in Greenville.

- How fascinating that is.

- It's providing our students with a global engagement experience, I think is another value-added asset to ECU, and we like to ensure that we provide transformative learning experiences to the people who come through these doors.

- Chancellor Philip Rogers, we thank you for your time.

There's so much more we could talk about.

Perhaps we can do this and visit again.

But all the best to you for the success of this university, the continued success.

And thank you for the leadership in this state.

- You're welcome to come back anytime and always remember, go Pirates.

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