Carol S. Spalding Is Building Rowan Cabarrus Bigger Because the Students Keep Coming

SALISBURY, N.C. Each semester more than 300 students sign up for welding at Rowan Cabarrus Community College, and qualified applicants still wait for a seat because the shops are full. On February 25, 2026, President Carol S. Spalding helped break ground at the North Campus in Salisbury on the answer: a Technology Education Complex of roughly 40,200 square feet, due to open in the summer of 2027.

The plans call for 43 welding stations, nearly double what the campus has today, along with a machining and fabrication lab, a lab for welding robotics, a CNC plasma cutting lab, a metrology lab for precision measurement and four classrooms. Dr. Spalding described the building as a promise to Rowan County, a place to prepare residents for well paid work in fields where employers say they cannot find enough people.

Getting buildings funded has been a recurring task of her presidency, which has already seen voters approve four bond issues. Now she is making the case for one more. On November 3, Cabarrus County residents will decide on a $400 million education bond, with $60 million set aside for the college. At a public forum in early October she laid out what the money would cover: maintenance and renovation, more space for a growing student body and a new Workforce Innovation Center of about 70,000 square feet on the South Campus. She put the cost at $7.50 a year for each $100,000 of appraised property value and warned that putting the projects off would only raise the price.

The pressure behind those requests is visible in the enrollment figures. In the 2024 to 2025 academic year the college served 24,305 students, a gain of 13.7 percent over three years, and 14,380 of them were in continuing education and workforce programs. Rowan Cabarrus ranks sixth among North Carolina's 58 community colleges in total enrollment and third in workforce enrollment. In 2025 it awarded 2,015 degrees, diplomas and certificates.

Some of its training now draws people from around the world. The Okuma Machine Tool Academy operates inside the Dr. Carol Spalding Advanced Technology Center in Kannapolis, the North Carolina Research Campus building named for her in 2021, and it is the only Okuma center of its kind anywhere. More than 800 students and industry professionals, including employees of SpaceX and Harley Davidson, have finished its intensive courses in CNC programming, equipment maintenance and advanced manufacturing. This spring the North Carolina Community College System gave Rowan Cabarrus and Okuma America Corporation its 2026 Innovative Leadership Award, one of the system's highest honors.

Her own route into community colleges began on the student side of the counter. After a move as a young Navy spouse, she held a college degree yet could not find a job, so she enrolled in continuing education classes. That experience taught her how much a flexible, local college can matter to an adult starting over, and she has carried the lesson through her career.

She joined Florida Junior College in Jacksonville in 1975, later Florida Community College at Jacksonville, first as an instructor and coordinator of grant funded programs and then as director of continuing education for its Open Campus. From 1986 to 2008 she served as the Open Campus's founding president. Years before online classes became ordinary, the unit was building other ways to learn, including degree completion programs for Navy personnel whose transfers and duty hours made a standard semester hard to finish. For a quarter century, from 1983 to 2008, she also hosted "Politics Is Your Business," a television program produced by the League of Women Voters.

Her degrees arrived in step with her responsibilities: a bachelor's in international relations from the University of Louisville in 1971, a master's in human resource management from Pepperdine University in 1986 and a doctorate in educational leadership from Columbia University in 2003.

She came to Rowan Cabarrus in 2008. The State Board of Community Colleges later named her President of the Year, citing her advocacy for student success, the growth of continuing education and training under her watch and her work uniting community leaders behind economic development. The American Association of Community Colleges gave her its Outstanding College/Corporation Partnership Award, and the Charlotte Business Journal named her a Top Woman in Business. She is treasurer of the Instructional Technology Council, a national group focused on distance learning.

In February 2026 the college hosted legislators and partners at its Research Campus facilities to mark North Carolina's ranking by Site Selection magazine as the top state in the nation for workforce development. Dr. Spalding credited that standing to strong leadership, steady investment and the work of the community college system, and she used the occasion to show lawmakers what Rowan Cabarrus is doing for students and employers.

Dynamo Times recognizes Carol S. Spalding, EdD, for building a community college that keeps pace with the people and industries it serves, and for nearly five decades of opening education to adults whose lives do not follow a standard path.