SANFORD - Leaders from Central Carolina Community College and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have announced a new partnership to improve opportunities for the college's students to transfer to and graduate from the university.

The partnership is an expansion of the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program, or C-STEP, an innovative program that has helped nearly 250 students transfer to UNC-CH since its launch in 2006. 

C-STEP identifies talented low- to moderate-income students while they are still in high school or early in their community-college careers and guarantees their eventual admission to the university if they earn an appropriate associate degree and successfully complete the program. It also offers special events and advising, both at their home college and at Carolina, while they are pursuing their associate degrees.

"On behalf of our students, faculty and administration, we are excited to become part of the C-STEP family," said Dr. Bud Marchant, president of Central Carolina Community College. "Our students are more than ready to make full use of this opportunity. We know they will make their mark on the world as graduates of Central Carolina and UNC-Chapel Hill."

Central Carolina and UNC-CH will immediately begin working to identify a cohort of eight to 15 students to enter the program as soon as August. 

Central Carolina is the sixth partner school to join C-STEP, which already includes Alamance Community College, Durham Technical Community College, Wake Technical Community College, Carteret Community College and Fayetteville Technical Community College. 

"We're grateful for this opportunity to expand C-STEP to another part of North Carolina," said Holden Thorp, chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill. "This partnership will help students find their way to Carolina and graduate on time. We look forward to welcoming these students to Chapel Hill and helping them achieve their dreams."  

C-STEP was founded at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006 with a grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Designed to help low- to moderate-income students transfer from community colleges to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduate on time, C-STEP has proven to be extraordinarily successful. 

To date, 86 percent of all C-STEP students have earned their bachelor degrees within five semesters of their enrollment at UNC - a rate that equals that of first-year students at the university, who are among the best-prepared college students in the nation. A grant from the Triad Foundation First Generation Fund will support this latest expansion.

For more information, contact Stephen Farmer, UNC-CH associate provost and director of undergraduate admissions, (919) 966-3992 or sfarmer@admissions.unc.edu; or Mark Hall, CCCC lead humanities instructor/C-STEP coordinator, (919) 718-7422 or mhall@cccc.edu.