College prep: When to start?
A new scholarship program announced last Thursday provides students from school districts that sign up with UT the chance to arrive at UT their freshman year with $10,000 already in the bank.
The new Scholarly Savings Account, outlined in the Blade here, gives schools the ability to partner with UT to set academic, behavioral and other metrics students must meet in order to have $2,000 set aside each year to go toward attending UT.
This program adds another opportunity for students following the success of the UT Guarantee, which brought hundreds of well-prepared students to UT from the largest urban school districts in the state. Both programs mandate that students and their families start thinking about, and preparing for, college earlier.
In fact, the boards of UT, Owens Community College and Toledo Public Schools have held several joint meetings in the past year focusing on the need to start preparing students for college at a younger age. (I.e. let’s buy a 6th grade science textbook that sets the foundations for students’ 10th grade chemistry classes that in turn prepares them for Chemistry 1230 freshman year at UT – a shout out to Dr. Jorgensen who still knew my name 5 years after I took his chemistry class in 2000.)
If parents and students know in 8th grade that if they work hard money will no longer be a barrier to attending college, it changes everyone’s mindset early on. Whereas if you suddenly realize senior year that you want (need) to go to college, you may not have been taking the classes needed to be ready to step into first-year science, math or English college courses.
Scholarship money is good. Higher education is too expensive – a point frequently made by UT President Lloyd Jacobs and the reason he pushed so hard for the tuition freeze in 2007. But as important as the money is the mindset and work ethic needed to achieve success. Preparing for that success earlier in life makes it available to a much broader population of students, and UT’s scholarship programs are helping push students to prepare.
Jon Strunk is UT’s media relations manager, a graduate of UT’s College of Arts and Sciences, a student in its College of Business Administration and a man constantly wary of his cell phone ringing. With the media having only so much space and so much time to tell a story, Jon has reserved this space on the World Wide Web to highlight, analyze, complain, lobby, beg, apologize and comment on media coverage of UT, higher education and, from time to time, his half-hearted quest to replace his ’96 Mercury Sable.
October 27th, 2009at 12:22 pm
Instead of funding gimmicky scholarships, why don’t we simply lower tuition for all? UT tuition is reasonable, but combined with fees it can be a steep burden on many folks who don’t fall into one of these special group. Lower tuition for all would benefit more people.