Wilmington College was, in its earliest years, exactly the kind of place the G.I. Bill had been designed to fill. The New Hanover County Board of Education ran it. Accreditation came in 1948 from the North Carolina College Conference; in 1952 the more important Southern Association of Colleges and Schools gave its approval. In 1958 control passed from the county school board to a board of trustees, with the state Board of Higher Education taking oversight - a quiet but decisive shift from local school district to state-supported institution. By then the campus had moved off Market Street to a sandy 661-acre tract south of town, where pine flatwoods and longleaf savanna would slowly give way to brick academic buildings and the long allee of Chancellor's Walk.

Like most public Southern colleges, Wilmington College admitted only white students at first. That changed in 1962, when Marshall Collins and Ernest Fullwood enrolled as the school's first Black students - eight years after Brown v. Board, two years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and decades before the federal government would consider the work of desegregation finished. Collins's enrollment did not make headlines at the time. It also did not transform the campus overnight. But it was a beginning, and by the late 1960s the college that had once served only the veterans of one war was beginning, slowly, to serve a community more like the actual region around it.

On July 1, 1963, the North Carolina General Assembly granted Wilmington College the authority to award bachelor's degrees. Six years later, on July 1, 1969, the college was elevated to university status and renamed the University of North Carolina at Wilmington - the fifth campus of the UNC system. Master's-level graduate programs followed in 1977. The university now runs seven colleges, including a business school named for Bruce B. Cameron, a marine biology center near Myrtle Grove that has become a national research hub, and a watson College of Education that trains a sizable share of the region's teachers. Enrollment in 2024 was 18,848 students - undergraduate and graduate combined - which makes UNCW one of the larger campuses in the system and, by recent rankings, the fastest growing.

The unofficial nickname is UNC by the Sea, and the sea is close enough for it to feel earned. Wrightsville Beach is six miles east. The Center for Marine Science, on Myrtle Grove Sound, runs research vessels into estuaries that students can walk to. The school color is teal, which is the color of the Atlantic on a clear summer morning when the sea state is calm and the bottom is sandy. The Lumina Theater on campus is named for the lost dance pavilion that once illuminated Wrightsville Beach with six thousand exterior lights - a memory pinned now to a 333-seat film theater that runs cult movies, art house features, and a 24-hour marathon called Hawk-In. Athletic teams are the Seahawks. Eighteen Division I teams compete in the Coastal Athletic Association. Basketball is played in Trask Coliseum; baseball at Brooks Field. The campus has thirty-five residence halls, named almost without exception for things that fly or swim - Pelican, Sandpiper, Loggerhead, Terrapin.

The university's library reopened in August 2024 after a two-year, eighty-thousand-square-foot expansion that more than doubled its size. The original Randall Hall, named for William Madison Randall, the school's third chief executive, kept its name and original entrance. The new wing, Discovery Hall, added study spaces, a data visualization lab, an expanded MakerStudio, an exhibit gallery, and the kind of group work rooms that students now use the way an earlier generation used the stacks. For two and a half years during construction the library staff improvised in temporary spaces. The reopening, at a campus that grew from 238 students to nearly 19,000 in seventy-seven years, marked something that does not happen often in the UNC system - infrastructure built deliberately ahead of the next wave of growth.