Balancing the Badge and a Degree: How Tuition Benefits Made It Possible
In 2017, Stephanie Klein signed up for a single college course. It wasn’t much, but it was all she could manage. At the time, she was a patrol officer at UNC Charlotte, rotating between day and night shifts while raising a son with her husband. “That’s what I could do with family and work,” she says now.
Each semester brought another class, another few credits. It was slow going. And with a degree in culinary arts already behind her, few of her previous courses transferred into her new field of study, criminal justice.
Still, she kept going.
Then, in 2023, a new law (SB 390) made it official: full-time UNC System police officers could now attend any of the 17 system universities tuition-free. That means officers like Klein could level up their education, from undergrad all the way to doctoral programs, without paying a dime in tuition.
That changed everything.
“When this came about—oh, we can go for free and we can take as many classes as we want. Well, what am I doing here? I need to get this done,” Klein says.
With the financial burden lifted, she picked up the pace, doubling and sometimes tripling her course load each semester and enrolling in summer classes as well. Most of her classes were online, which made balancing school with her full-time role more realistic.
“Since, I want to say, 2019, I’ve done it all online,” she explains. “So that’s awesome for me because I can do it on my time. Focus on work when I’m at work. Focus on school when I’m at school.”
A New Field, and an Unexpected Fit
Klein works as the accreditation manager for UNC Charlotte Police & Public Safety, where she holds the rank of lieutenant. She supervises the university’s Communications Center, serves as a liaison with emergency management, and ensures that departmental procedures meet national accreditation standards.
Her criminal justice courses aligned directly with her role, but it was a second major, sociology, that caught her by surprise.
“I was short a lot of credits, so I had to take a lot of electives,” she says. “And I picked up sociology and I really liked it.”
Those classes deepened her understanding of society, culture and community interactions, and gave her new ways to think about the relationships between law enforcement and the people they serve. “That knowledge really affects the way police departments engage with the community,” she says.
Real-World Impact, Right Now
One of the most valuable experiences came from a project in a criminal justice course that required her to map campus crime.
“I’m not a math person. I never was,” she says. “But I had to do this assignment, and it was really interesting collecting the data and plotting where crime occurred on campus and surrounding areas.”
That project now informs the way she and others think about patrol strategies, especially in areas with historically higher crime. “I’m not out on patrol anymore,” she says. “But how officers patrol, how they’re checking buildings and parking lots and decks in areas with high crime—that definitely applies in the field.”
Looking Ahead and Giving Back
Klein has already finished her American Studies minor and is on track to earn her B.A. in Criminal Justice in May and her B.A. in Sociology the following December. But she’s not stopping there. She’s already planning to pursue her master’s degree, with an eye on earning a promotion to Captain if the opportunity arises.
“Education means more promotional opportunities within the department. It means paid increases,” she says.
As an adult learner, Klein has seen how much higher education has changed since she first attended college. Gone are the pens and notebooks. Now it’s all laptops, logins, and balancing acts.
Still, she’s glad she came back. And she’s not keeping the opportunity to herself.
Younger officers often come to her for advice on the tuition program: how to enroll, whether to study online or in-person. “It’s a super easy process,” she tells them. “I push it. I’m always asking, ‘How’s school going?’”
After all, it’s not just about earning a degree. It’s about opening doors, and holding them open for others.