Following expansion of school choice, fewer families apply for vouchers this year

An update on vouchers including county level data by income tier, new applications, and a change in leadership at NCSEAA

In 2023, the N.C. General Assembly passed a state budget including what Republicans called the “largest expansion of school choice” in 10 years.

Following the expansion, one year ago, the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority (NCSEAA) received 69,511 applications for Opportunity Scholarships by the deadline on March 1, 2024.

Opportunity Scholarships are state-funded vouchers families can use to pay for eligible private schools. NCSEAA is the state agency designated by law to administer K-12 scholarship programs. 

Data on the NCSEAA website indicates that the number of vouchers disbursed has increased since school choice expansion from 32,549 as of June 30, 2024.

In November 2024, the General Assembly overrode then-Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of its mini budget, providing an additional $463.5 million toward vouchers for this fiscal year to clear the waitlist for students waiting for funding.

That funding increase led to the big bump up you see in the data for February 2025. Students don’t show up in the data until both the school and parent certify that the student is enrolled and attending the school.

To date, that’s an increase of 47,725 voucher recipients since expansion.

The law expanding access to vouchers allowed families with any amount of income to apply for a voucher for the first time. On March 6, 2025, data was presented to the legislature about the wealth of the families of recipients of the vouchers.

Depending on family income, recipients are eligible for between $3,458 and $7,686 based on the tuition and fees charged by the private school they will attend.

In this chart, you can see for the first time by county how many students are receiving vouchers by income tier.

Graham County is not on the list because it does not have any recipients.

As you can see, while statewide 14% of recipients are in the highest income tier, in some counties that percentage is much higher. In Chatham County, 30% of recipients are in the highest income tier, followed by 28% for Mecklenburg, 27% for Wake, and 26% for Orange.

Data has yet to be released on how many of these students were already in private school, but the data provides a first look at where poverty is concentrated for public schools. Statewide, 42% of recipients are now in the highest two tiers of income.

If you compare the June 2024 to the March 2025 data, you can see that the number of white students has increased from 63% to 74% and the number of non-Hispanic students has increased from 80% to 88%, while the number of Black students has decreased from 19% to 11%.

Seventy percent of voucher recipients — 55,621 — live in urban counties.

This year, NCSEAA says it received 40,089 new applications for vouchers by the March 6, 2025 deadline — that’s 29,422 fewer than last year.

Here is the data by income tier for the new applications:

For students who had been attending public school, the school districts, whose revenue is based on the number of students served, would lose the full per-pupil expenditure across local, state, and federal funding for these students.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in an article titled, “School choice need not mean an expensive windfall for the rich,” says under the surface of school choice expansion, “an important debate is brewing: how to balance the drive for educational freedom with other essential values, including fairness and fiscal responsibility. Simply put: Must the expansion of school choice result in windfalls for America’s wealthiest families, particularly those that already send their children to fancy private schools? Especially when that means blowing big holes in state budgets?”

Mary Shuping is serving as the interim executive director of NCSEAA

Mary Shuping, NCSEAA’s director of governmental and external affairs, is currently serving as interim executive director of NCSEAA, according to a press release.

Shuping joined NCSEAA in 2021. Her career in state government includes serving as the education director for the State Ethics Commission, working for almost 10 years at the legislature staffing different committees and commissions, and working with the North Carolina Community College System.

The tagline for NCSEAA is “We help North Carolina pay for education.” In addition to administering Opportunity Scholarships and ESA+, NCSEAA administers the Next NC scholarship program, which gave out more than $136 million to almost 66,000 students in the 2023-24 school year.

NCSEAA, according to the press release, runs the state’s primary need-based scholarships for North Carolina as well as privately funded ones. Last school year, it awarded more than 104,000 grants and scholarships to students attending higher education, for a total of almost $260 million.

NCSEAA also manages the state’s forgivable loan programs, which offers loans to qualified students who are enrolling in education programs like nursing and teaching that are in high demand in the state. Last year, it awarded more than 2,500 of these loans for a total of more than $24 million. Additionally, students provided over 1,200 years of service to the state through the program, cancelling a year of loans for each year of service.

“I’m so proud of the work we did to increase access to education for North Carolina students,” says Andrea Poole, the outgoing executive director of NCSEAA. “And I’m grateful for the support and hard work of all the staff at NCSEAA who work tirelessly to make our programs the gold standard in college access.”  

Poole is now serving as chief of staff to UNC System President Peter Hans. 

The data

Here is NCSEAA’s data on vouchers. Note there is a tab in the upper left of the map for 2024-25 county data, and a tab to the right of that for 2024-25 state data. On either tab, you can download an Excel spreadsheet, which includes data on students by grade, race, and ethnicity; funds by county and funds by school; and students by county.

Here is the data for October 2024.

Here is the data for November 2024.

Here is the data for December 2024.

Here is the data for January 2025.

Here is the data for February 2025.

Here is the data for March 2025.

Mebane Rash

Mebane Rash is the CEO and editor-in-chief of EducationNC.