Roush, assistant vice president of strategic partnerships at Elon, writes about how universities can help North Carolina's economy grow. Read an excerpt below.
North Carolina has shown strong economic growth in recent years, attracting major corporate investments such as JetZero and Amazon. In the first six months of the year, the state recorded 58 new projects representing 7,249 jobs and $5.6 billion in capital investment.
We’re the envy of much of the rest of the country.
But sustaining that growth will require more than recruiting companies to North Carolina. It will require making sure the state has the talent, skills and ideas those companies need to grow once they arrive. And that means building stronger, more intentional relationships between businesses and the state’s universities, colleges and community colleges.
Higher education has long provided workers, research, technology and ideas to thousands of North Carolina businesses. But as competition for jobs and economic investment becomes fiercer — and as artificial intelligence, tariffs and demographic changes reshape the workplace — the relationship between higher education and business needs to become a much higher priority.
The reason is simple: universities cannot effectively prepare students for the future of work if they aren’t talking regularly with the people creating that future.
Colleges nationwide are facing a well-known enrollment cliff, with a projected decline of at least 13% nationally by 2041 because of declining birth rates. Six of North Carolina’s biggest school districts saw enrollment declines in 2026, and the number of public and private high school graduates in the state is expected to plateau between now and 2041, according to the N.C. Office of State Budget and Management.
At the same time, North Carolina is projected to need more than a quarter of a million additional workers by 2034. The companies hiring those workers will want graduates who can contribute quickly—not only with technical knowledge, but with critical thinking, communication, problem-solving and the ability to adapt.
That creates an important responsibility for higher education: to listen to employers as carefully as universities expect employers to listen to them.