Until the last decade or so, nationally people had to think hard to place what state Raleigh was in, although it is the state capital.
So it was sort of a political town with local fandom for North Carolina State University, not to be confused with its arch sports rival University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill up the road.
The university at Chapel Hill is the state system flagship campus. NCSU, on the other hand, started out as an agricultural and engineering school for men but has since evolved into a STEM powerhouse and a research center. NCSU probably has a greater proportion of students who are first in their family to attend college.
Now Raleigh is more famous for being a comfortable somewhat stable place to live and is growing fastest in the state. A near large suburb, Cary, is said to be an acronym for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
Probably more famous, earlier, is the adjacent Research Triangle Park, a collaboration of state government and large banks to attract a nexus of high powered research organizations that was launched back in the 1960's.
It has served as the model for many other research parks in the U.S., and abroad, but few are as established and successful. Major organizations starting out included a huge IBM facility, one of the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, a state funded Research Triangle Institute, the National Humanities Center, Glaxo Klein pharmaceuticals, the Environmental Protection Agency research labs, and now numerous others, though IBM has since decamped. Locally, RTP claims the international fame.
The writer David Sederis wasn't born in Raleigh but grew up mostly here. The writer Guy Owen, who wrote Flim Flam Man, which was made into a movie with George C. Scott taught at NCSU for most of his career. A research scientist at NIEHS in RTP, Martin Rodbell, received the Nobel Prize for medicine, though I believe he lived in nearby Chapel Hill.
