An online university plans to create 300 in-person jobs in Raleigh, starting now
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- WGU's East Coast Hub office in Raleigh is nearly 50,000 square feet.
- The Raleigh office employs 105 administrative staff and WGU plans to triple that.
- WGU has 6,100 North Carolina students and nearly 12,000 graduates since 2017.
Ben Coulter’s father, Myron, served as chancellor of Western Carolina University in the late 1980s and early 90s. Today, the younger Coulter is the North Carolina chancellor of a school with a name just one word away — Western Governors University.
Western Governors University is an online, private, nonprofit school founded in 1997 with nearly 200,000 students enrolled across all 50 states. Though it’s headquartered in Salt Lake City, the school has now opened its second-largest office — in Raleigh.
A new Raleigh campus
On Tuesday, WGU held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Raleigh office. The sleek space spans nearly 50,000 square feet across the sixth and seventh floors of an office building in the Crabtree Valley neighborhood.
As of its opening, the office is home to 105 administrative staff. The university plans to triple that number in the next five years.
There are 6,100 North Carolinians currently enrolled in WGU degree programs — and nearly 11,000 that have already graduated since WGU began operating in North Carolina in 2017. In 2019, it opened a seven-person office in Durham. Coulter says this new, much larger Raleigh office is key to increasing WGU’s visibility in state-level civic, policy, and business discussions.
The top WGU programs in NC are business, cybersecurity and nursing. Of its NC students, 46% are first-generation college students and 22% are classified as low-income, according to Coulter. The school has 350 faculty members working in the state and transfer partnerships with 38 of the state’s 58 community colleges.
The Raleigh office won’t change the remote instruction experience for WGU students, but it will ensure that student support services are available on Eastern Standard Time hours.
Gregg Sinders, a member of WGU’s North Carolina advisory board, told attendees of the ribbon cutting that “there were some people in North Carolina that didn’t want [this] to happen.”
How colleges begin in NC
In North Carolina, the UNC System must give its approval to any nonpublic and out-of-state institutions hoping to award degrees here. Leaders at WGU told The N&O that the System reached out about its plans for the Raleigh office.
“The UNC System Office Licensure team is currently reviewing WGU’s application based on [our] statutory and policy requirements,” System spokesperson Andy Wallace told The N&O. “As part of that process, staff routinely seek information about an institution’s planned activities in North Carolina, including whether it intends to offer in-person instruction or maintain a physical presence in the state. That process is not a competitive review. It is a consumer-protection and state authorization function. The System’s responsibility is to determine whether institutions operating in North Carolina meet the requirements established by state law and Board of Governors policy.”
Sinders called it a “weird law” on Tuesday. “It’s a fairly rigorous process, so when you take the process plus the people that really didn’t want competition, it was a struggle, but we got it done,” Sinders said.
But university president Scott Pulsipher says WGU doesn’t aim to be a competitor, but rather an addition to North Carolina’s higher education ecosystem. He says the school’s offerings are targeted to working adults that wouldn’t otherwise pursue a post-secondary degree.
But the UNC System wants to reach those people too.
Degree programs for working adults
In 2022, UNC founded Project Kitty Hawk, which helps its universities launch online degree programs designed for working adults.
The System found that two-thirds of North Carolinians who were enrolled online were attending out-of-state universities. Since then, there’s been a focus on “clawing some of that market share back.”
In March, the System announced that more than 3,000 students had enrolled in Project Kitty Hawk since its inception. It was initially projected to hit more than 30,000 students by 2028.
Meanwhile, WGU has seen double-digit enrollment growth in North Carolina every year since 2021, Coulter said.
“For all the woes that COVID brought, I think it validated the model of online learning, and especially for teachers and for faculty members,” Coulter said. “Higher ed is dripping off the walls here in North Carolina, but there still is a need for our citizenry to have access to post-secondary education. We offer that in a low-cost, accessible way, and it’s been a successful model.”
WGU is “competency-based,” meaning that students are evaluated based on assessments they take rather than time spent in class. WGU charges one flat fee per six-month term, and students take as many courses as they are comfortable with within that time frame. The average yearly tuition for a bachelor’s degree at WGU is $8,300.
The Raleigh office will host teams like program development, infrastructure and operations, product engineering, and student support services. No academic instructors or mentors will work on site.
This story was originally published June 23, 2026 at 4:37 PM.
