With costs to attend college rising and students’ ability to pay declining, UNC-Greensboro is trying to make education more affordable with a new scholarship called the UNC-G Guarantee.
The scholarship was announced last week. A press release compared it to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Covenant scholarship.
The new scholarships require academically gifted students near the poverty level to pay only what they can afford for school and allow them to graduate without student loans.
“The program is not just financial aid but a complete well-rounded plan, and it comes in at poverty level and helps those with limited financial resources but a high academic profile,” said Steven Roberson, dean of undergraduate studies at UNC-G.
“The university is creating a home away from home to foster success.”
Although the UNC scholarship requires 10 to 12 hours a week of work-study, the UNC-G scholarship does not allow students to work, preferring that they focus on school.
An anonymous $6 million donation provided the funds to launch the program. The university expects to continue funding the scholarship mostly through donations, which they expect will grow over the years, Roberson said.
It is already working on fund-raising campaigns and ways to find money sources within the university.
Sarah Hatcher, a UNC-CH senior and Carolina Covenant scholar, said that without the scholarship, many Covenant scholars would have chosen less expensive schools than UNC-CH. She said having the scholarship eased the burden on her.
“I went to a small high school, and I didn’t get a lot of scholarships. (The Carolina Covenant) eliminated a lot of the load I would have had,” she said.
UNC-G plans to kick off the program with 30 to 40 students for the full four years in the fall.
Administrators plan to grant the scholarship to a maximum of 150 students after all four years of students have been phased in, Roberson said.
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