DURHAM - In recent years, both N.C. Central University and the state's public university system have emphasized retaining students and getting them to graduation day.

But in Minnie Sangster's view, the faculty can only do so much with limited resources.

Sangster, for 24 years a French professor at NCCU, recently became the university's new faculty chairwoman. She sees a student body arriving on campus with some deficiencies, and a faculty struggling to get the time to deal with each student.

"It's a very thorny question because one of the problems at HBCUs historically has been the lack of resources to accomplish that mission," she said when asked about improving graduation and retention rates.

"Most of the lower-level classes are rather large and that's where the big attrition usually is," she explained. "If we had smaller classes and more possibility of more attention, that would help. We're moving in that direction, but historically that's a big problem. The faculty's role is to facilitate the educational experience, but when you have over a hundred students you're dealing with, that's very difficult."

One significant change to the undergraduate experience is already helping, Sangster and others say. The university last year revised the University College, placing a greater emphasis on the freshman and sophomore years and beefing up advising.

Two years ago, NCCU's retention rate - the percentage of freshmen who returned for the sophomore year - was 68 percent. But last year, that number rose to 77.6 percent.

The UNC system is now talking about more closely linking graduation and retention rates with enrollment funding, which would force universities to reach certain benchmarks in order to receive additional funding to grow. NCCU's retention target, for example, is 76 percent.

Graduation rates vary widely across the public university system. The low: 33.4 percent of UNC-Pembroke students who enrolled in 2002 graduated after six years. The high: UNC-Chapel Hill, where 85.6 percent of students graduated in that time period. NCCU graduates about half its students within six years.

Sangster thinks many students aren't ready for college when they arrive, the product, perhaps, of an ultra-competitive, aggressively marketed college admissions process.

"I think one reason is that colleges are more and more competitive in attracting students, and students who in the past may not have considered college decide it's the only way to get ahead," she said. "So in high school they weren't thinking along those lines and taking the courses that best prepared them for that."

On other topics:

The NCCU faculty's big project this will be the first revision to the faculty handbook, which lays out all policies and procedures, in 12 years. The university has changed a great deal since them, doubling its enrollment and splitting the former college of arts and sciences, which once had 24 academic departments, into three separate colleges.

On NCCU's coming move to Division I in athletics:

"So long as athletics is self-supporting, I think it's fine," she said. "My concern is if in any way academics is being under-funded because of athletics. It seems often we talk about student-athletes, but we talk more about the athletes than the students. I hope our move to Division I will result in our having better students as well."