Speeches and articles	Narrative biography
Reports to the State Board of Community Colleges	Vita

 

R. Scott Ralls, Ph. D., became the seventh president of the North Carolina Community College System on May 1, 2008.  The State Board of Community Colleges elected him to succeed retiring President H. Martin Lancaster.

 

With 58 colleges serving more than 800,000 students each year, the North Carolina Community College System is the third largest in the United States and is internationally recognized for its programs to foster economic and workforce development.

 

Scott Ralls is only the second system president to have served as a local North Carolina community college president and the first in thirty years.  Between 2002 and 2008, Dr. Ralls served as the President of Craven Community College with campuses located in New Bern and Havelock, North Carolina.  During his tenure, the college achieved record enrollment growth and annual fundraising support, and gained recognition for innovations in technology-based workforce development  During these years, Craven Community College opened the Institute for Aeronautical Technology, developed the Bosch and Siemens Advanced Manufacturing Center, initiated the first college-based Red Hat Linux Academy in the nation, and led the statewide redesign of community college information technology curricula to correspond with national industry skill standards.  The college also significantly expanded its health care education programs and gained statewide recognition for fostering unique educational partnerships, including its University Connections program with East Carolina University and NC State College of Engineering, and Craven Early College, a model technology-based early college initiative with Craven County Public Schools fostering strategic career pathways.  Craven Community College also became known for its broad-based community engagement, and in 2007 Dr. Ralls received the Freedom Fund Award from the Craven County NAACP for his “efforts to actively identify and incorporate the true needs of the community into the mission of Craven Community College.”

 

Dr. Ralls has been an active leader in North Carolina’s early college and high school transformation initiatives, having been appointed to the North Carolina New Schools Board by Governor Mike Easley.  With 37 early college high schools on its campuses, North Carolina community colleges host 22% of the early college high schools in the United States.  Dr. Ralls has also worked with the British government in their review of community college-equivalent Further Education (FE) colleges in England and in 2007 was named the 10^th honorary fellow of Warwickshire College in the UK.

 

Dr. Ralls has previously held workforce development leadership positions at the state and national levels, including as Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development for the North Carolina Community College System where he helped foster collaborative initiatives with North Carolina’s biotechnology and information technology industries.  He has also previously served as the Director of the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Division of Employment and Training where he worked closely with the state’s Workforce Development Boards and provided state oversight of job training programs for disadvantaged individuals and those affected by plant closings.  At the national level, he served as the Manager of Workforce Programs for the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he fostered workforce development initiatives through the national network of manufacturing extension centers, and as a policy specialist with the U.S. Department of Labor where he authored the national report, Integrating Technology with Workers in the New American Workplace, and was a recipient of the Secretary’s Exceptional Achievement Award.

 

Dr. Ralls holds a Bachelor of Science degree with highest distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Maryland, where his research focused on technology implementation, workforce training and issues affecting older workers.

 

He is married to Lisa Rowe Ralls, the former Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning for the Council for Entrepreneurial Development in the Research Triangle.  They have two sons, Benjamin (9) and Lucas (7).

 

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