Following World War II, North Carolina created public junior colleges and industrial education centers to meet the educational demands of veterans and expand the technical skills of the state's workforce. Despite the creation of these campuses, in the early 1960s North Carolina ranked 47th in the number of citizens in college, and 66 counties in state possessed no campus to serve the local area. A system of comprehensive community colleges created in 1963 to extend education in the state comprised 56 campuses that enrolled 387,000 students by 1972. Few of the leaders or upper administration of the rapidly expanding community college system possessed doctoral education. Created in 1966 to alleviate this problem, the Community College Internship Program was designed to provide an intensive two-year doctoral training for personnel from the community college system. The program played an instrumental role in the early development of the state's community colleges and the professionalization of its leadership.