america's #1 HS

NCSSM has stood mightily in West Durham since its opening in 1980. Including a new campus in Morganton and its online programs, NCSSM has served the state and world as a model for publicly funded, residential schooling innovation.

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By law, NCSSM’s mission is to (a) foster the educational development of North Carolina high school students who are academically talented in science and mathematics, while (b) also serving as a hub for innovations in instruction and curricula (North Carolina General Statute 116-232).

 

This mission is uniquely realized through a zero-cost educational model for families that guarantees tuition, room, and board for all admitted and enrolled students. NCSSM Admissions draws students from every NC congressional district to intentionally build a richly diverse student body across socioeconomic and geographic lines. Collectively, the school serves nearly 1,500 students from 93 of North Carolina’s 100 counties. With no class rank due to the uniformly high caliber of its students, NCSSM fosters an intellectually collaborative environment designed to maximize curiosity and academic excellence. Students take classes comparable in difficulty to those of a graduate-level STEM course. 

 

In 2024, the state allocated $45,331,072 to fund just under 90% of NCSSM’s annual operation costs (NC OSBM, 2024). To mitigate this gap, the NCSSM Foundation serves as the school’s primary nonprofit partner, overseeing donations, fundraising campaigns, and endowment management. As a UNC System institution, the NCSSM Foundation invests its endowment through the UNC Investment Fund, LLC (UNCIF), which grew nearly 60% between 2019 and 2024 (UNCMC, 2025). NCSSM has benefited from an investment income of $140,152 annually during this same timeframe. Additionally, the Foundation’s fundraising efforts have secured approximately $7.6 million in annual contributions since 2020 (ProPublica, 2025). 

 

The annual economic contribution of NCSSM and its alumni to North Carolina’s economy surpasses $1.34 billion, with more than half of the school’s 12,000+ graduates paying taxes within the state (Hewitt, 2020). This extraordinary return on public investment underscores NCSSM’s role as a powerful innovation engine for North Carolina. Approximately one in five alumni engage actively with the NCSSM Foundation, while parent participation reaches an impressive 38%, demonstrating a robust and loyal donor community (NCSSM, n.d.).

 

One parent of a 2020 graduate took this commitment even further: Joe Colopy, a highly successful tech entrepreneur and investor in the Triangle. As his daughter, Ximena, experienced NCSSM, Colopy came to recognize, in his words, “just how special NCSSM is” (Faircloth, 2024). In October 2022, Joe and his wife Karalyn announced a transformational $1.5 million endowment gift to establish a technology entrepreneurship program at NCSSM. Their vision was to “cultivate entrepreneurs who one day may change the world” (Parker, 2022). The gift was structured to support the hiring of a dedicated educator to provide sustained, ongoing entrepreneurial opportunities with the power to create a long-lasting impact on students (Parker, 2022).

 

Ahead of the 2024 school year, NCSSM Chancellor Todd Roberts appointed Chip Bobbert — formerly a senior technologist and Innovation Architect at Duke University — as the inaugural Director of the Colopy Entrepreneurship Program (CEP) at NCSSM. Bobbert was tasked with designing a cutting-edge interdisciplinary program that would build on NCSSM’s mission of inspiring students to design their world.