Leader relishes N.C.'s breadth

Ralls will lead the college system

When you're the son of a Methodist minister, you get used to uprooting your life every four years.

Such was the boyhood of Scott Ralls, who moved with his family from town to town in Western North Carolina -- Charlotte, Waynesville, Mount Airy, Morganton, Asheville.

On his college application essay to UNC-Chapel Hill, Ralls wrote that all that moving had been an advantage, not a disruption. He had learned to grow, make new friends and adapt to unfamiliar situations.

Ralls, 43, who will start as president the state's community college system April 1, says he understands the people, the beauty and the challenges of North Carolina. He grew up in the west, lived as a young adult in the booming Triangle and spent the past five years in the east, where he is president of Craven Community College in New Bern.

"I don't really have a hometown," he said last week. "I have a home state."

He experienced one of his favorite days a few years ago in Gates County -- he could then say he had visited all 100 counties. He has a map plotted with barbecue houses and is known as a connoisseur of the state's succulent chopped pork.

"I love the state in all its breadth, in all its complexity, in all its differences," he said.

But the state is undergoing constant change, including a big influx of immigrants who have less education. Ralls has been careful not to take a position on the explosive political issue of the day: whether the system should allow illegal immigrants to attend community colleges as out-of-state students. That issue is under review by the Attorney General's Office.

Ralls will head a system of 58 community colleges, a gateway to prosperity for tens of thousands of North Carolinians in a state that has struggled economically. The colleges are the main provider of work force training and adult education, leading students to better jobs and careers. Increasingly, the colleges are a steppingstone to a four-year university degree.

He has a sense of students' working their way out of poverty. Although he is not among the first generation in his family to earn college degrees, he is not far off. His mother's family was rooted in textile towns in South Carolina. His grandfather was a barber with an eighth-grade education who managed to send four children to college.

Ralls sees the community college system as offering a way for working-class people to move ahead. You can't walk onto a community college campus, he said, without seeing "little miracles."

"We're champions for those folks who want to champion themselves and haven't had a lot of opportunity in their lives," he said.

Finding his passion

Ralls got interested in work force issues as a college student in the 1980s. He worked at The Daily Tar Heel student newspaper at UNC-Chapel Hill but found that he didn't have a passion for journalism. He took a Japanese history course and studied in Tokyo. There, he got a close view of advances in automation.

"I remember going through the Nissan factories and thinking at that time, 'This has tremendous implications,' " he said in an interview.

After earning a degree with highest distinction from UNC-CH, he went to graduate school at the University of Maryland. There, he studied industrial and organizational psychology, focusing on the human side of business and technology. He wrote a dissertation about how aging workers adapt to computer training.

In the early 1990s, he started his career in work force development in Washington at the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Labor. But he and his wife, Lisa, yearned for North Carolina. They returned to their home state when she got accepted to UNC-CH's graduate business program.